Common Spotted Orchids

2013 is turning out to be a good year for orchids here at The Beeches. In 2011 we had a grand total of 14 orchids and last year only 11. This year we have reached a total of 30 Common Spotted Orchids and so that is definitely satisfactory progress towards the vision of meadows drenched in orchids. The surprising things is that one meadow has shown no significant change in numbers and the other has an increase of more than 400%. The first field has gone from 8 flowers in 2011 to 6 and then 7 this year. The other has gone from 6 orchids to 5 in 2012 and this year has 23 specimens. Of course these are small numbers so we can't read anything into them but it will be interesting to see how the numbers change over the next few years.