Ben Jacob looks back on his lifelong passion for Britain’s native orchids, and reveals why he has risked heavy fines and even prison to save them
A garden centre. The soft artificial light of neon bulbs. Aisles hung with gloves, plastic bottles, plant food. Houseplants perched on white tables. Maybe not a place conventionally thought to change a life, but it changed mine. Not the bottles or gloves, but one of those houseplants. There it was in a plastic pot in the company of a few others, long, dark-green, strap-like leaves fountaining around columns of big star-shaped blooms that seemed to have been fashioned out of ruby, opal, citrine. The moment I saw it everything else lost focus. Those flowers held me spellbound. The plant was an orchid, a Cymbidium originally native to parts of Asia, propagated to feed a lucrative market in tropical orchids. I didn’t know that at the time. I was nine. I had been interested in nature – birds, mammals, David Attenborough documentaries – for a long time, but that exotic bloom was a league apart. It held me entranced. My parents were kind enough to buy it for me (I think they liked it, too) and my first orchid sat on the landing, its flowers slowly dying. The challenge was to make it flower again.
I saved up pocket money earned from washing my dad’s car to purchase a book called Essentials of Orchid Care (or something like that). As this was in the days before the internet, getting hold of that book required convincing my parents that we needed a return trip to the garden centre, which (oh, what a coincidence) might also afford me the opportunity to feast my eyes on other orchids. As they are keen gardeners, this was not a challenge. Alas, they did not agree that the first Cymbidium deserved a companion, but I could buy the book.
