Now that there is not much happening on the meadows as we approach winter it’s good to look back on some of the summer happenings. The highlight this year was certainly to find this Southern Marsh orchid (Dactylorhiza praetermissa) flowering on the Front Meadow.
I suddenly noticed it coming in to flower in early June. Very exciting because I had no idea it was there. It doesn’t have spots on the leaves like D. fuchsii has, so of course there was no way of seeing it in amongst other foliage in previous years as it developed. This is the first orchid to flower on the Front Meadow.
The Front Meadow is a long strip of grass between our front hedge and the road, and I don’t know whether it is part of our property or not – probably not. A lot of houses around here have them and it seems they are, understandably, not mown by the council any more, if they ever were. The unwritten rule is that each house-owner takes care of the grass outside their house. We only arrived here in June 2018, and of course my instinct was to convert it into a wildflower meadow, so I have managed it like that for nearly 4 years.
As well as wildflower seed mixes I started scattering some orchid seed from my own plants about 3 years ago, and so this presumably is the first visible result of that. An encouraging sign, because 3 years is about the quickest one could reasonably expect an orchid to get to flowering size. Hopefully it will return bigger and stronger next year and there will be more orchids flowering as well? You never can tell with orchids, though, so let’s wait and see.
I don’t know what the locals think about the Front Meadow. There are some other houses nearby that are doing similar things with their verges. Some people have said nice things as they pass by, but I suppose others just think it looks scruffy. Fair enough - wildflower meadows are popular nowadays, but not for everyone. However, for those of us who love nature isn’t it exciting to think you can go from boring mown-grass verge to Southern Marsh orchid in 3 years?
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