Orchid-napped!

‘IF humans should feel safer this morning knowing that crime is going down quicker than a White House intern, the same sadly cannot be said for flowers.

Now growing in the Anorak garden

The country’s flora will rightly be aquiver today at news in the Times that Britain’s rarest wild orchid has been stolen.

The paper says the lady’s slipper, which has a yellow cup-shaped centre and purple petals, was dug up from its home beside Silverdale Golf Course in Lancashire.

It had flourished in a quarry near Morecambe Bay – one of only two sites in the country where it is known to grow – for the past 80 years…until this week.

Rob Petley-Jones, the English Nature site manager who has cared for the plant for the past 12 of those 80 years, says the flower is ‘beyond price’.

‘People have known about it for generations,’ he says. ‘A thoughtless act of greed or selfishness has taken it away from us.’

And another case file goes into the unsolved drawer…’

Posted: 22nd, July 2004 | In: Broadsheets Comment | TrackBack | Permalink