Nature notes: a good month for orchids

July is a good month for finding wild orchids. Most of the commoner ones have gleaming purple or purplish-pink flowers clustered together in a spike. Seen from in front, the individual flowers look rather like faces with a big lower lip. Marsh orchids can be abundant now in damp, undisturbed meadows, often alongside rivers. They have tall, straight spikes of flowers, with spotty, rather dog-like faces. Pyramidal orchids are well-known in chalk country, either on open slopes or beside woods. They are predominantly pink, and when they first come up they have an unmistakable flowerhead shaped like a pointed hat. The flowers have plainer faces. A more delicate, wispy orchid is the fragrant orchid, a plant of the chalk downs, also with simple-faced flowers but with a powerful sweet scent. The bee orchid is unique. Its velvety lower lip looks like a large brown and yellow bee — which attracts bees to come and pollinate it.