Southern Marsh-orchid

This morning Pete and I travelled to Kedleston Park just north of Derby, where I'm carrying out a botanical survey. The journey seemed rather long and tedious, and the sat-nav struggled with the intricacies of Derby's road system, which meant that we saw rather more of it than was desirable and didn't arrive till after 11 am. 

By 12.30 pm we'd only managed to look at a very small percentage of the site and I was beginning to panic that we wouldn't get it all visited in our two day stay. Fortunately we speeded up considerably, and by the time the park closed at 6 pm we'd seen most of the area to the south of the lake. I'd been asked to particularly focus on the grasslands, but most were species-poor - in fact the best areas that we found were in areas designated as woodland, where there were some small patches of species-rich sward with orchids, including a small colony of Southern Marsh-orchid in perfect condition.