PYRAMIDAL ORCHID

PYRAMIDAL ORCHID

With its dense pyramid shaped cluster of bright pink flowers the PYRAMIDAL ORCHID, Anacamptis Pyramidalis, is a true beauty that can be found growing throughout the UK. It grows in grassland, coastal areas, scrubland and roadside verges and flowers in June and July with the densely packed flower head holding up to 100 little flowers, and can grow to roughly 55cm in height.

PYRAMIDAL ORCHID

I’ve not seen many of these little beauties on my travels but you can’t miss them really, when you do find them, as the bright pink petals are so vibrant they stand out from the surrounding greens of the grassy areas it likes to grow in, like a beacon. The specimens I have shown here were growing in a small group of only half a dozen plants on the edge of some long grass at the bottom of the sea defence of a local tidal river. There was a few more individual plants growing further along the track but these were the bigger plants.

PYRAMIDAL ORCHID

A little fun fact here for you. Orchid seeds do not store enough food to grow on their own so they team up with a mat-forming fungus in the soil to feed it and in return the roots of the orchid protect the fungus. I’m pretty sure this is called ‘symbiosis‘.

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