Since his childhood in the Somerset Levels, Jon Dunn has been ‘lost to orchids’; yet as an adult, living on Shetland, he had seen only about two-thirds of Britain’s wild orchid species. Then he conceived the plan of a journey to find all 50 to 60 species during ‘one frantic, glorious, kaleidoscopic flowering season’. This book, the record of that venture, follows an erudite naturalist through one summer, from early purple orchids to the rarest, the ghost orchids of dark woodlands in autumn.