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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 it, but I am assured its presence has been felt. After dodging the ‘dodgy’ gentlemen, Joanna Cary also avoided ‘the murder cottage’. Nowadays, it is a pretty house adjacent to the barn at the very edge of our wood, but its reputation must have lingered on for decades. As the Henley Standard reported at the time: ‘Friday, December 8th 1893 will always be regarded as a black day in the annals of Henley history.’ The body of the thirty-year-old housekeeper who looked after the farmhouse, Miss Kate Dungey, was found in the woods a few yards from the door with ‘a terrible gash in the left side of the neck, and a number of wounds about the head’.

      It was quite the shock headline of the day; the gruesome story was reported prominently as far away as New Zealand. It had all the right ingredients to impress the public. ‘The spot is as remote and lonely as could possibly be found, and there is very little likelihood of cries for help being heard,’ the Standard reported; and naturally ‘it was a dark and miserable evening’. Miss Dungey was an interesting victim, ‘of good figure, had dark hair, and is said to have been good looking’ – moreover, she was an ex-governess for the children of Mr Mash, fruiterer and owner of the house, so she had the trappings of a gentlewoman. ‘Almost all around Henley knew Miss Dungey and speak well of her,’ the newspaper continued. Could robbery be a motive when ‘nothing had been touched in the house, not even the watch on the sitting room chair’? There were signs of a struggle and blood by the front door, so perhaps the grisly killing took place as the poor woman attempted to flee her assailant. A thick, cherry-wood cudgel discovered by the body may have been involved, but something much sharper caused the deep gash.

      Over the next month new evidence emerged, as well as rumours that Miss Dungey had a romantic interest in a local married man, details of which never appeared. By 3 January 1894 one Walter Rathall had been arrested for the crime. He had worked as a labourer on the farm, and led a rackety and irregular life, being at times little more than a tramp. Jackson’s Oxford Journal reported on 13 January that Rathall slept out in the woods all the previous summer – our woods. The paper described how Kate Dungey had advanced him money, which she never recovered, and that ‘he had been discharged principally through the instrumentality of Miss Dungey, with whom he had several quarrels’. Despite an apparent motive, the circumstantial evidence gathered by the police proved insufficient to secure Rathall’s conviction. He walked free; the murder mystery remained unresolved, as it still is to this day.

      Hayden Jones, the current occupant of ‘the murder cottage’, tells me a ghost story. On the hundredth anniversary of the murder it was another ‘dark and miserable evening’, though cosy enough inside the house. Hayden relates that the company decided to have a toast to the memory of ‘poor Kate’. As the glasses were raised all the lights in the house were suddenly extinguished – poof! Hayden had previously encountered a definite reluctance on the part of certain woodsmen to enter his premises: a shake of the head and a polite refusal. A presence, they said. It is all nonsense, of course, as every rationalist will agree. Yet, since I heard the story of Miss Dungey, I have been in the wood on an overcast, windy evening late in the year when I heard a sudden brief, distant cry – it must have been a red kite out late, or even a frightened blackbird. And a crunching noise behind the holly bushes was surely just a small, squirrel-weakened branch falling suddenly and noisily to the ground; it is no restless murderer’s shade on the march. Ignore the sudden shiver. Let’s not be silly.

      The tortuous saga of the ghost orchid prompts me to make a thorough quartering of Grim’s Dyke Wood in June. It is too much to ask of my tiny piece of ground, I know, but that does not stop me peering closely at every beech-leaf-filled gulley. I will not miss a thing, I tell myself, and for half an hour I trudge like a botanising zombie up and down, up and down. For an instant, my heart stops. Here are two yellow stems arising from the ground and bearing flowers. There is no sign of a leaf, or anything green. So is it an orchid? The stems curve over at their apices like shepherds’ crooks where perhaps half a dozen yellow flowers hang down, almost in the fashion of our bluebells; however, these flowers are tubular. This is not a shape known from any orchid. This may be no ghost, but it still thrills like a sudden, strange apparition. The Red Data List7 records some of the most precious and uncommon species of plants in Great Britain, and this is one of them, in our very СКАЧАТЬ