Dear Readers, over the years I’ve found a lot of unexpected plants in East Finchley, but this Pyramidal Orchid ( Anacamptis pyramidalis) was the most unexpected. It was growing in a tiny triangle of rough grass in the middle of a car park (forgive me for being a little coy  about the exact location, but I don’t want some eejit to pick it). My friend L spotted it at the weekend, and we are both astonished – we can only think that it’s growing because it’s in a remnant of the meadow that existed way before the tarmac went down. The seeds of Pyramidal Orchid don’t contain enough food to germinate on their own, so they go into partnership with a soil fungus.

Darwin was fascinated by orchids, and discovered that the pollen in orchids is clumped into little coherent ‘blobs’ known as pollinia. These then attach to the tongues of moths and butterflies and are transferred to the next orchid that the insect visits. Below is Darwin’s own drawing of the pollinia attached to the tongue of a butterfly. What an amazing scientist Darwin was, and what a debt we owe him.

Pyramidal orchids can be found throughout western Eurasia, and one of their strongholds is on the chalky soils of the Isle of Wight. They do like disturbed soils, so they can sometimes also be found on road verges and quarries, presumably where the fungi that they rely on to thrive can also be found. And of course, there is now at least one in East Finchley too, though just the one as far as I can see, having had a good walk around the vicinity to see if I could see any more.

As with all orchids, the individual flowers are very interestingly shaped, as you can see from the close-up below. As you might guess from the name, the flowerhead as a whole is pyramid- shaped.

Photo By Hectonichus – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15709806

When I look at a Pyramidal Orchid the thought ‘ooh that might be tasty’ doesn’t immediately occur to me, but in fact the root of this plant and various other orchid species are used to make a white, starchy powder called salep. Orchid roots have always been considered as powerful aphrodisiacs and fertility-enhancers (the word ‘orchid’ comes from the Ancient Greek for ‘testicle’, which the roots were thought to resemble). The Ancient Romans used the root of Pyramidal Orchid and other orchids to make drinks called ‘Satyrion‘ and ‘Priapiscus‘, both of which were thought to act to improve ‘performance’ (and I don’t mean in the 100 metres). Paracelsus, the ‘Father of Toxicology’ wrote:

“behold the Satyrion root, is it not formed like the male privy parts? No one can deny this. Accordingly, magic discovered it and revealed that it can restore a man’s virility and passion”

In the Ottoman Empire, the root was used to make a drink for young women in order to fatten them up before marriage. The drink then spread to the UK and Europe as an alternative to tea and coffee – in the UK it was known as ‘saloop‘. It was thought to cure ‘chronic alcoholic inebriety’ and, more shamefully, venereal disease, which meant that drinking it in public became a source of embarrassment. The drink was increasingly associated with ‘the lower orders’ – note that someone is drinking out of a saucer in the Rowlandson cartoon below. My mother used to drink her tea out of a saucer if it was too hot, so clearly she hadn’t got the memo.

A cartoon by Rowlandson, showing the lower orders drinking saloop. This file has been provided by the British Library from its digital collections.Catalogue entry., CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=31452779

Salep became so popular that it became illegal in Turkey to export it , due to the decline in wild orchid populations. However, the attention of the salep sellers has now turned to the orchids of Iran, where it was estimated that between 7 and 11 million orchids of nineteen species and sub-species were collected from northern Iran in 2013. Yikes! As we know there’s no price people won’t pay for sexual enhancement (see also tiger bone and gorilla meat), and this in the age of Viagra. Sigh.

And oh my goodness! Here’s a poem, by Peter Daniels. It won first prize in the Arvon International Poetry Competition back in 2008, and it feels even more apposite today. See what you think.

Shoreditch Orchid by Peter Daniels

They’re grubbing up the old modern
rusty concrete lampposts,
with a special orange grab
on a fixture removal unit.
The planters come up behind
with new old lampposts in lamppost green,
and bury each root in a freshly-dug hole.
The bus can’t get past, brooding in vibrations.
We’re stuck at the half-refurbished
late-Georgian crescent of handbag wholesalers.
The window won’t open. The man behind me
whistles “What a Wonderful World”,
and I think to myself:

Any day soon
the rubble will be sifted; the streets all swept,
and we’ll be aboard a millennium tram ride,
the smooth one we’ve been promised, with a while yet to go
until the rising sea and the exterminating meteor,
but close before the war
starting with the robocar disaster.
And when the millennium crumbles,
I’ll be squinting through the corrugated fence
at the wreck of the mayor’s armoured vehicle, upside down
where they dumped the files of the Inner City Partnership;
and as I kick an old kerbstone
I’ll find you, Shoreditch orchid, true and shy,
rooting in the meadow streets
through old cable, broken porcelain, rivets and springs;
living off the bones of the railway.
You’ll make your entry unannounced,
in the distraction of buddleia throwing its slender legs
out in the air from nothing,
from off the highest parapets, cheap
attention-seeking shrub from somewhere
like nowhere. But here
you’ll identify your own private genes,
a quiet specimen-bloom seeded in junk,
and no use to any of us; only an intricate bee-trap
composed in simple waxy petals, waiting
for the bees to reinvent their appetite.

We’ll be waiting for the maps to kindle
as we get settled, where we find ourselves
undiscovering the city,
its lost works, disestablished
under the bridges. There’s no more bargaining
for melons and good brass buttons.
We share your niche
and crouch as the falling sun
shines through smoke, and the lampposts
fail to light the night to the place all buses go.