Download the full blog with images here
We call them “native orchids” as do the Australians and Americans. Britain shares some European orchids, so Englishmen refer to “wild orchids,” the French have “orchidées sauvages” and the Italians “orchidee spontanee” (rhymes with Whakatāne). I’m sure “spontānee” doesn’t translate literally but I do like the idea that they are spontaneous — fresh, original, free, unrehearsed, unplanned and with an element of surprise.
We left New Zealand in midapril and we spent a couple of days in Rome to get over the jet lag. Pope Francis had just died and the eternal city was awash with nuns, priests, groups of black-clad men from The Godfather and the lesser faithful. We missed the funerary procession and took the fast train (well, it took us) to pick up our rental car in Foggia, the nearest city to our destination — the Gargano peninsula, the spur of Italy, a great limestone mountain between the Foggia plain and the Adriatic.
It is an “orchid hot spot”. Paul Harcourt Davies, prolific British writer about European orchids and leader of guided tours on the peninsula, calls Gargano “the most wonderful natural limestone rockery I have ever encountered” [1]. I have wanted to go there for years, as, I think, any orchid lover would.
We stayed in Monte Sant’Angelo (where the archangel Michael appeared 1500 years ago to the local Bishop in a grotto), now a pretty little white mountain town. We had no guidebook or map, but I had downloaded Davies’s paper and another by Andrew Cleave that gave an indication of promising sites [2]. There are formal organised naturalist tours but we wanted the freedom to wander in our own time.
We drove toward the town of San Giovanni Rotondo, exploring roadsides, branch roads and likely spots, later the slopes below Monte Sacro. The lovely lonely mournful dong of cowbells and the repetitious call of a cuckoo filled the mountain air. This is no wilderness: most of it is grazed by cattle. In contrast to destructive sheep and goats, they leave a good 5cm of lower leaves, allowing the pasture plants to survive and prosper.
And prosper they certainly do. The orchids I mean. We were not trying to find every one of the many species present here (it is a splitter’s paradise, with considerable hybridisation and within-species variation) but simply to see as many as we could and to try to identify them. The sheer range and numbers were astonishing.
We travelled light: the photographs below were all taken either by Kristy with her iPhone 14 Pro (with built in macro lens), or my old fashioned iPhone 8 with a cheap macro attachment from Temu — no aperture control of course so no ability to vary the depth of focus. The orchids were everywhere, often in countless numbers. Davies suggests getting “off the beaten track” for the best sites but we were never more than 100 metres from the car and still found a bewildering array of species. I have attempted to identify some of them in the images below but this is specialist work, well beyond my capability.
After Gargano we had a few nights by the sea, Vieste and Peschici, then drove up the Adriatic coast, taking a diversion if there was a national park nearby — we visited Monte Sibillini and Monte Cucco. Italy is not just the centre of Christianity, not just the birthplace of the Renaissance, not just the home of many of the greatest composers, painters, sculptors and soccer players the world has known, it is also a treasury of wildlife — and for me, of orchids, even at the roadside and often spotted from the car. In our last week, at Castellina-in-Chianti, we discovered a violet limador and fly orchids a metre from the track into our accommodation.
Why would a NZ orchid enthusiast seek out European orchids? There are many reasons, some too hard to explain, but Davies’s rather chastening words carry the most important message perhaps….
Gargano gives a sense of perspective when you can examine a myriad orchid flowers of the same species and thus get a feel for the innate variability, which can be considerable. Too often, extreme examples of a single species are conveniently selected, all intermediates are neglected, and a new “species” is dutifully announced in a journal that is not “peer reviewed”.
We returned to noisy crowded Rome, watched Pope Leo give his inaugural mass from the Bridge of the Angels and left for home.
References
Paul Harcourt Davies (undated). The Gargano Peninsula, Europe’s finest natural rockery, a personal view. https://www.paulharcourtdavies.com/the-gargano-peninsula.
Andrew Cleave 2019. Flowers of Italy’s Gargano Peninsula, a Naturetrek Tour report. https://www.naturetrek.co.uk/tours/flowers-of-italys-gargano-peninsula.
Italy is a colourful country, its people stereotypically flamboyant, the conversation and the music loud, the pace fast. The drivers are competitive, need to lead and are impatient to pass in impossible places — I dont think they had ever seen a driver pull over to let a car sitting on its tail go past; I surmised that they would say to themselves, “Why would he do that? he was winning and he just gave up!”
The wild orchids are extraordinarily coloured and shaped, exciting to discover — but one does begin to long for home. A homesick Robert Browning wrote this in 1845 while in Italy…
Home thoughts from abroad
Oh, to be in England
Now that April’s there,
And whoever wakes in England
Sees, some morning, unaware,
That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
In England—now!
And after April, when May follows,
And the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows!
Hark, where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge
Leans to the field and scatters on the clover
Blossoms and dewdrops—at the bent spray’s edge—
That’s the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over,
Lest you should think he never could recapture
The first fine careless rapture!
And though the fields look rough with hoary dew,
All will be gay when noontide wakes anew
The buttercups, the little children’s dower
—Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower!
I emailed similar ruminations to my daughter, who replied, “Give me a gaudy melon flower over a buttercup any day.”
Well, yes, perhaps so.