The wildflowers of Britain include all manner of treasures – yet many people are only aware of a few, such as bluebells and foxgloves. A lot of its other flora are rare because of Britain’s location at the northern, western or even southern edges of their natural geographic – and hence climatic – ranges.
In fact, Britain has over 1,000 native species of wildflower, including 50 kinds of orchid, a few species like sundew that use sticky tentacles to eat insects, and others such as toothwort that live as parasites, plugging their roots into other plants to suck on their sap like botanical mosquitoes. There are even a few species, such as the ghost and bird’s-nest orchids, that extort all their food from soil fungi.
