The Wood for the Trees: The Long View of Nature from a Small Wood. Richard Fortey

Only’. In this argument I am obliged to take the part of my precious beech trees. Although I can find some records of tree damage by red squirrels, it does not seem to be as extensive as that caused by the grey interloper. A proven continuity of fine beech woods in our patch points to the red squirrel as no more than an occasional nuisance. Maybe they were once popular enough as food to keep the numbers down. Most damage happens in years when lots of squirrels have come through a mild winter following a good year for beech mast: overpopulation is part of the problem. One of my woody neighbours shoots as many greys as he can; another believes nature will correct the numbers in her own good time.

      I have found a bleached squirrel skull to add to the collection, manner of death uncertain. I simply want to believe that there will still be tall, healthy beech woods here in the century to come, so that some future J.S. Mill may glory in their abundance. In the end, global warming might be more important than any kind of squirrel. The New Sylva warns that if summer drought increases, beech ‘may disappear from the Chiltern Hills except on northern slopes with moist soils’. To survive at all, the woods will have to move northwards, alongside the delinquent greys. They will become partners in a human crime. I shudder at the thought.

      Two ghosts and a Dutchman’s pipe

      When the beech canopy captures the sun the forest floor becomes a darker place. The bluebells have faded, and only faint greasy traces reveal the wraiths of their dead leaves. The grasses that made a brief, bright sward are muted now; nodding wood melick has set its seed for the year and will soon aspire to invisibility. Taller, elegant wood millet (Milium effusum) raises its flowering spike in wispy tiers making a brief show of green flowers that dangle from the ends of spread branchlets like tiny beads. Only sedges by the wayside are more obdurate. Their tufts and clumps of coarse, dark-green leaves see out the seasons, though few passers-by would notice them if there was the bright promise of bluebells in the woods beyond. Wood sedge (Carex sylvatica) briefly dangles little rods dotted with yellow stamens in spring, and then might even be described as pretty.

      Its broader-leaved companion, thin-spiked wood sedge (Carex strigosa), is a recherché plant for botanical enthusiasts, with flower spikes so discreet that I can only identify the species with a lens in one hand and a book in the other. It is something of a rarity, though it seems to grow enthusiastically enough in ruts left by tractors. Distant sedge (Carex remota), with the thinnest leaves of all our sedges, lurks inconspicuously by the damp seep, and has its greenish fruits tucked into its leaf bases, so that anyone giving it a casual glance would think it a grass. Toughness in sedges is evidently inversely proportional to their showiness. But even they cannot grow under the largest beeches. Apparently, nothing can. The deepest leaf litter is inimical to living things. It is a place fit only for ghosts.

      The rarest plant in Britain is such a ghost: the ghost orchid (Epipogium aphyllum).3 It disappears like a phantom and then conjures a new haunting in a new wood. It has been declared extinct, and then spookily reappeared, even after decades. It is a spectre much sought by botanists; some plant-hunters develop an obsession with its rediscovery. And it made one of its few and unexpected appearances in Lambridge Wood. Ninety years ago a young Henley woman called Eileen Holly found it in deep litter where nothing else will grow. It appeared from 1923 until 1926. A lively eyewitness account from a prolific botanical diarist, Eleanor Vachell, leaves no doubt about the drama of the discovery – even though it reports the ghost of a ghost:

      28 May 1926. The telephone bell summoned Mr. [Francis] Druce to receive a message from Mr. Wilmott of the British Museum. Epipogium aphyllum had been found in Oxfordshire by a young girl and had been shown to Dr. [George Claridge] Druce and Mrs. Wedgwood. Now Mr. Wilmott had found out the name of the wood and was ready to give all information!!! Excitement knew no bounds. Mr. Druce rang up Elsie Knowling inviting her to join the search and a taxi was hurriedly summoned to take E.V. [Eleanor Vachell] and Mr. Druce to the British Museum to collect the particulars from Mr. Wilmott. The little party walked to the wood where the single specimen had been found and searched diligently that part of the wood marked in the map lent by Mr. Wilmott but without success, though they spread out widely in both directions … Completely baffled, the trio, at E.V.’s suggestion, returned to the town to search for the finder. After many enquiries had been made they were directed to a nice house, the home of Mrs. I., who was fortunately in when they called. E.V. acted spokesman. Mrs. I. was most kind and after giving them a small sketch of the flower told them the name of the street where the girl who had found it lived. Off they started once more. The girl too was at home and there in a vase was another flower of Epipogium! In vain did Mr. Druce plead with her to part with it but she was adamant! Before long however she had promised to show the place to which she had lead [sic] Dr. Druce and Mrs. Wedgwood and from which the two specimens had been gathered. Off again. This time straight to the right place, but there was nothing to be seen of Epipogium!

      2 June 1926. A day to spare! Why not have one more hunt for Epipogium? Arriving at the wood, E.V. crept stealthily to the exact spot from which the specimen had been taken and kneeling down carefully, with their fingers they removed a little soil, exposing the stem of the orchid, to which were attached tiny tuberous rootlets! Undoubtedly the stem of Dr. Druce’s specimen! Making careful measurements for Mr. Druce, they replaced the earth, covered the tiny hole with twigs and leaf-mould and fled home triumphant, possessed of a secret that they were forbidden to share with anyone except Mr. Druce and Mr. Wilmott.4

      It is a measure of the allure of this botanical will o’ the wisp that even a cut stem provoked such delight. The flower in person might have induced a serious attack of the ghostly vapours. It is a pretty enough plant, with a few, quite large blooms for a European orchid, each with a pleasingly pinkish spur and yellower sepals. It is fragrant, and probably insect-pollinated. But the plant has no leaves. It has no green on it anywhere. It consists only of a flower spike and the ‘tuberous rootlets’, or ‘coral-like rhizome’, as V.S. Summerhayes described it in Wild Orchids of Britain5 (this led to an alternative common name of ‘spurred coral root’). The scientific species name aphyllum even means ‘without leaves’. Since the flowers blend almost perfectly with beech leaves as a backdrop it is little wonder that they so readily escape detection: it’s a ghost in camouflage. It seems to be an impossible plant, because it has no chlorophyll to manufacture vital proteins and sugars. It clearly does not need light; it can grow in deepest shade where no other plant flourishes. In my old copy of Summerhayes, the author attempted to solve the mystery by allowing the ghost orchid to get its nutrients ‘already manufactured’ from ‘the humus of the soil, which consists of numerous more or less decayed parts of plants and also animals’; in other words, to grow like many fungi – which never have chlorophyll. The story is much more nuanced than that, although mushrooms do indeed play a part, as we shall see.

      After Eleanor Vachell’s visit the orchid vanished from Lambridge Wood. Stirring up its rhizome would not have helped. Joanna Cary, who lived nearby and was wont to wander in Lambridge as a child, tells me that in the 1950s she used to avoid crossing paths with funny men in gaiters up in the deep woods, and assumed they were flashers, or worse still, burying something unspecified. It was probably Mr Summerhayes and his eminently respectable band of ghost-hunters. Another local plant enthusiast, Vera Paul, continued the botanical tradition by finding Epipogium at a site just a couple of miles away, sporadically, for over thirty years until 1963. I have seen a drawing of the famous plant framed on the wall at her former house in Gallowstree Common. More recently, the orchid disappeared completely for more than twenty years, until a remarkably persistent ghost-pursuer, Mr Jannink, rediscovered a small example in 2009 in one of its old sites near the Welsh border, far, far away from the Chiltern Hills.6 The ghost orchid is not extinct in Britain after all. However, nothing I have read explains how a plant with such minute seeds can apparently jump so dramatically from place to place. There is something almost spooky about it.

      Another ghost haunts Lambridge Wood. Nobody has actually seen