Dactylorhiza incarnata and others.

[daveyp1970]

Pics from the only Dactylorhiza Incarnata site i know of in my neck of the woods.






I will follow up this thread as the others are in flower.

[daveyp1970]

After ifinished yesterday i whent back to see what was in flower,well the three main Dacts were in flower,fuschii,praetermissa,incarnata and i think some purpurella and so many hybrids between them it becomes really hard to key them out and also some ophrys.
Dactylorhiza fuschii

[daveyp1970]

Dactylorhiza purpurella and others

[daveyp1970]

[daveyp1970]

[daveyp1970]

[Pauli]

Lovely variety of Dactylorhizas !

The Ophrys is apifera

[Maggi Young]

What a range of flowers and what a super place to be able to visit to record them, Davey. Thanks!

[Brian Ellis]

Stunning Davey, I'm sure we could all wish for one or two of them!

[fredg]

Nice little site you have over there Davey 

[mark smyth]

  they are stunning

[Peter Maguire]

Lovely range of species/hybrids/whatever there Davey.
That's the nice thing about Dactylorizas, you can come back from a day out with 50-100 photos, sit down for several hours with a reference book, and still end up with no idea about what is on the pictures.        I recognized the Ophrys though. 

Round here I've only seen D. purpurella open so far. Mind you. looking at your pictures, I think that more time crawling around on my knees this weekend is called for, I'm obviously missing something. 

[daveyp1970]

Thank you everybody.
Peter if you head towards Tesco after Kenton roundabout and across the road of the hotel on that bit of wasteland purperella is there and if you carry on down that road passed tesco's you will come to a nature reserve there are a few sp there.

[Peter Maguire]

They're even closer than that Davey - if you know Newcastle reasonably well you may know the road that approaches the city centre from the aformentioned roundabout. If you take the slip road to the town centre just before the complicated underpass system there is a small colony there on the left, and the council grass cutters carefully go around them!
With careful positioning, you can get a photo of the plants with the city centre road sign in the background - here's one from a couple of years ago.

I will have a look for the colony you mentioned when I go to do the shopping later. The local nature reserve you mention has what I've always assumed to be D fuchsii but I haven't seen any others that I'm aware of. We did have a wondeful site for D fuchsii nearby - an old reclaimed mining site - which had hundreds of flowering spikes until the council bulldozed the lot to prepare the ground for an industrial site which has never been built. Their environmental impact assessment turned up no newts (no ponds in the mining spoil), no badgers (hard work digging in that mine waste) and so they sent the bulldozers in. There's about twenty plants left there.

[daveyp1970]

Thats fantastic Peter a new site to me.