In celebration of its ninetieth anniversary Norfolk Wildlife Trust has identified its 9 for 90: nine species representing major landscapes of the county in which it works. For the North Norfolk Woods Living Landscape the spring-flowering early purple orchid has been chosen.
Nothing you have seen today is strictly natural. Ponder that for a moment: nothing in Norfolk is natural. To be sure, the blackbird hopping across your lawn is a natural feature of Norfolk, and the white-tailed bumblebee gorging herself on flowers in your garden too. But the landscape of Norfolk, in which these organisms live, is almost completely non-natural.
Male chaffinch on cherry blossom, photo by WildStock
Let’s begin at the beginning. Some 12,000 years ago the Devensian Glaciation came to its end, leaving a post-glacial tundra across most of what is now the UK. With time, changing climate and the ecological process of succession, this open landscape became woodland. Most likely the papery seeds of birches blew in first, and the cotton-wool seeds of willows onto wet ground. These grew to become trees, and homes for birds, insects and other wildlife. Now imagine jays carrying in the heavy seeds of oaks, blackcaps planting brambles in their droppings, and millennia of leaves tumbling to the ground to be made soil by woodlice and worms.
In this way woodland formed. The natural habitat of Norfolk – of almost all the terrestrial UK – is woodland. It is not arable land; it is not gardens; it is not pasture; as wildlife-rich as these habitats can be. To be sure, these woods which for thousands of years covered Norfolk were dynamic. Late summer lightning would set trees afire, opening glades for light-loving species. Wild pigs would churn and plough the glades and the woodland understorey, keeping patches of open ground. Rivers would burst their banks, drowning the roots of trees and leaving their twisted skeleta in new marshes as roosts for cormorants and herons. The woods were always changing, opening and closing, giving space to the species of light and those of dark, but always they were woods. This was the wildwood, our county’s natural self.
The wildwood pertained until the Bronze Age when, to make way for our livestock and subsequently our crops, the mass felling of the UK’s woods began. It was then that people made the Norfolk landscape we imagine today is natural. It is not.
Woods are the most biologically diverse terrestrial habitats in Norfolk and the UK. This is both because they are what belongs here – what the landscape would soon become again if we all left – and because they are by far the most structurally diverse habitat we have. Put simply, in a wood there is most surface area, most three-dimensional space, for species to exist, to specialise, to thrive.
No wood is believed to have survived unaltered from the wildwood. What we do have, however, are ancient woods, which are known to have been woods for many centuries. Some, such as Foxley Wood in North Norfolk, are recorded in the Domesday Book of 1086. Others are found in old maps, in folk tales, in oral tradition. All are very old and have sheltered for centuries, even millennia, the fussy plants and animals which needed the wildwood for their survival.
The chaffinches, blackbirds, woodpigeons and great tits which frequent your bird feeders are woodland species; but they are generalists, opportunists, lovers of edges, able to adapt to the surrogate woods we make in our gardens and parks. There are many more woodland species which cannot adapt to parks and gardens, which need the stillness, the cool, the damp leaf-mould, the mottled shade and the history of a wood in order to survive. These are bluebells, wood anemones, wood sorrel, yellow archangel, yellow pimpernel, bird cherry, moschatel, longhorn beetles, rare hoverflies, pygmy woodlice and many more. These are the dwellers of old woods.
Spring oak tree in Thursford Wood, North Norfolk Woods Living Landscape, photo by Richard Osbourne
Among these many species of the old woods we have chosen the early purple orchid to represent the North Norfolk Woods Living Landscape. This Living Landscape is a vision for North Norfolk which allows the species of the wildwood to thrive in our modern countryside. No one can turn the fields back to woodland, nor our homes and gardens, nor our roads, shops and schools. What we plan to do, however, is help landowners preserve every patch of woodland and enhance its value for wildlife, and connect these precious places across the landscape through corridors of healthy habitat, for the free flow of specialist woodland wildlife and its genes between them.
This connectivity is crucial. Consider the early purple orchids of Foxley Wood. For centuries now they have been stranded in Foxley, with no influx of genes from other populations and no buffer zone against changing climate or against a disaster which could wipe out the species locally. In our North Norfolk Woods Living Landscape, with its proposed woodland corridors, the early purple orchids of Foxley Wood, and all of the woodland species around them, could in time reconnect with those of Swanton Wood, of Thursford Wood and of all the quiet forgotten fragments of woodland in North Norfolk.
The early purple orchid belongs to the natural wooded landscape of Norfolk; so it is a fine symbol for the North Norfolk Woods Living Landscape. It survives only in old woodland or in shaded hedgerows where woods once stood. It is beautiful too: a startling magenta spike, seen in early May, contrasting with the impossible blue of bluebells on the woodland floor or the eye-searing corner of an orange-tip’s wing. It is just one of many plants characteristic of these precious woods we protect and plan to reconnect. Where there are early purple orchids there are common twayblades too: slight, pale flowers rising from waxy green twin leaves. In some woods there are greater butterfly orchids: tall spikes of spectral blooms in a woodland ride. Around the orchids are wild strawberries in flower, and – treacherously similar – barren strawberries. The blossoms of wild cherry tumble downwards on the breeze to land on a bed of yellow pimpernel growing where water sits in wheel rut. These are among the many plants which need our old woods.
Nothing you have seen today is strictly natural. Ponder that for a moment: nothing in Norfolk is natural.
In the same woods the birds sing. From a cracked and weary sweet chestnut come the morse code of a nuthatch and his bright trill. A blackcap burbles cheerily from a blackthorn thicket, which flowered already a month ago. A marsh tit sneezes from a nearby downy birch. By night these same woods are snuffled by badgers and stroked by the wings of many moths and of brown long-eared bats. These woods are the most diverse habitat in Norfolk, and in the UK, and in our vision for a North Norfolk Woods Living Landscape they will again stretch across the land, reconnecting orchid with orchid, moth with moth and marsh tit with sneezing marsh tit.
In Gertrude’s account of Ophelia’s flowery death in Hamlet, scholars believe that the ‘long purples’ in her garland were early purple orchids. Shepherds, she says, give the plant a grosser name, referring no doubt to the long association of orchids with genitalia and sex. Shakespeare and such references aside, the early purple orchid is a glorious species, a symbol of the native habitat of Norfolk. It is a habitat which despite a human onslaught has persisted in our landscape through millennia, and which, in the next ninety years of Norfolk Wildlife Trust action and advocacy, we intend to restore in the North Norfolk Woods Living Landscape and beyond.