Looking for Orchids .
Meanwhile, I have been out book in hand, wandering in .the local woodlands and along the hedgesides, looking for orchids. My guide is the new book Wild Orchids of Britain, by V. S. Summerhayes (Collins, 21s.), who is in charge of the wonderful orchid collection at the Kew Herbarium. The book is profusely illustrated with coloured plates. so faithful in reproduction that specimens can at once be identified from them. I was thus able to name the Bird's Nest Orchid (Neottia nights- avis), which I found near a cord of cut wood, under a large beech-tree in mid-Kent. It is not a spectacular beauty, stalk and bloom being coloured alike, a dull olive-green with a whitish turn of the petals. But I had never noticed this species before, and should not have done so this week without the aid of Mr. Summerhayes' book, one likely to be authoritative in its fullness and arrangement of so vast a mass of material.
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