Northern Marsh Orchid

I love having orchids in my garden.

This Northern Marsh Orchid, Dactylorhiza purpurella, flowers there in June and July. Dactylorhiza contains ‘dactyl’, meaning fingers and ‘rhiza’ meaning roots, meaning ‘finger-like roots’, and purpurella means ‘purplish’. I didn’t dig it up to check what its roots looked like.

It’s a classic species of machair, a rare habitat only found on west-facing coasts of Ireland and Scotland. Machair is a Gaelic word meaning fertile, low-lying grassy plain. It’s found with Red Clover, Yarrow, Trefoils and other beautiful flowering plants and all the insect species that they support.