Hunt the lady’s slipper

Who would want to read a whole book about a teenage boy’s gap year? When most 18-year-olds take time off before university, they either head for Thailand to experience middle-class Western culture in warmer climes with more drugs, or spend six months shelf-stacking and six months ‘finding themselves’ at a Ugandan orphanage. A tedious evening in the pub during freshers’ week when all the gap year students bore one another into submission about how much better Mexico made them is normally enough. Leif Bersweden thought so much of his year off, though, that he wrote 360 pages about it.

But the difference between most gap years and the one that Bersweden describes in The Orchid Hunter: A Young Botanist’s Search for Happiness is that this teenager wasn’t trying to find himself but all 52 species of native orchid that flower in the British Isles. Most staid grown-ups are unaware there are so many orchids popping up in woodlands and sand dunes all around them, let alone teenagers whose definition of a ‘wild’ afternoon normally involves a muddy field at a music festival, not hunting through soggy peat for a pale green flowering spike of Hammarbya paludosa, the bog orchid.