Big Fat Orchids

It's a good time to look for Bee Orchids: lovely chunky glossy rosettes in the grass, like spring-greens (don't eat them, they're much nicer as flowers). Some will be 'blind' (i.e no flower) but many will put on the full display in a 2 or 3 months, tricking those gullible bees into pollinating them. Actually, that's not really true up in these northern climes - they're pretty much all self-pollinators. Mysterious things, like so many of the world's orchids; some years you might find none, the next hundreds: unpredictable and fickle, aloof and elegant, a bit pointlessly decorative - truly the supermodels of the plant kingdom. This one is in a patch of about 50 on a little roadside lawn in Freshwater.