Sigford, Devon: Common Spotted Orchid

23^rd June 2013

It had been a weekend of action.  Starting on Friday at Haytor, then on to Saddle Tor - we danced the sun down in celebration of the Solstice.  A wild evening; the wind blew our tatters horizontally and whipped the feathers from our hats.  We roared and weaved with fire and brimstone in our bellies and with sticks of lashing flame, before retreating to our tents in Teignmouth for the start of the Folk Festival and a two-day marathon of showing-off-in-fishnets.

I was feeling weary and woebegone before I ran into this display last night as I drove across Dartmoor towards Milton Combe, where Olivia and friends had a little gathering of music and moon gazing for her birthday.  They seemed to be fighting for attention with their proud pink spikes and I felt happy to see them.  

The Common Spotted-orchid  (Dactylorhiza fuchsii).  The flower colour can vary from white to pale purple with purple spots, a symmetrical pattern of dark purple loops or dots and dashes.  Some colonies are highly perfumed, attractive to day-flying moths.

The ancient Greeks whose word orkhis means testicle, gave the orchid family its name, based on the appearance of the tuberous roots.  In classical mythology, Orchis, the son of a satyr and a nymph, was turned into a flower after his death. 

In his Materia Medica, the first century A.D. Greek physician Dioscorides hypothesized that orchids influenced sexuality and ever since, people have associated the plant with virility, fertility, sex determination, and other aspects of reproduction, inspired perhaps by the exotic appearance, fragrance, and erotic aspect of its flower’s sexual parts.  The English Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite supporter John Ruskin called the flowers “prurient apparitions.” 

Early Greek parents believed they could control the sex of their unborn children with orchid roots.  If the father ate large, new tubers, the child would be male; if the mother ate small tubers, the child would be female.  European scholars believed that orchids sprang from ground on which animals had bred.  They were thought to be the food of satyrs and powerful aphrodisiacs.  In modern times the genus Paphiopedilum was named for Phaphos, a temple where the love goddess Aphrodite was worshipped.

Orchids have been used as a source of food, medicines, religious charms, adhesives, perfumes, straw, and flavourings as well as aphrodisiacs.  They are thought to cure fever, arthritis, dysentery, cough, headaches, and wounds in many parts of the world.  They are made into a remedy for sick elephants in Malaysia and a kind of ice cream in Turkey (where its name means “fox testicles”) that is said to prevent cholera, heal the spleen, and ease childbirth.

The Orchidaceae family is large and diverse, comprising about 25,000 naturally occurring species and more than 100,000 hybrids.  Orchids are native to every continent, though most occur in the tropics.  They are not carnivorous or parasitic, relying for sustenance on symbiotic relationships with fungi.  Unlike most plants, both male and female reproductive organs are carried on the same structure of the orchid, the column.