British Cephalanthera
White Helleborine, Narrow-leaved Helleborine and Red Helleborine
These three Cephalanthera species grow in the UK. At time of writing I’ve only seen White, Cephalanthera damasonium so will add the other species at a later date.
White Helleborine Cephalanthera damasonium
This orchid is potentially easier to spot than some if you’re looking in the right place at the right time! This is because it mainly grows in dense beech woodland on chalk and prefers to be surrounded by leaf litter rather than other plants. A green stem up to about 30cm is reasonably easy to spot growing through the brown forest floor. If you’re out in the woods in May or June, look for a stem about the height of a bluebell with white flowers. It doesn’t, however, clump or have a rosette of green leaves to spot so you’re just looking for a single stem.
White Helleborine leaves
Cephalanthera damasonium does not have a basal rosette but does have green leaves evenly spaced along its stem. It is only partially dependent on sunlight because it lives in shady woodland. It has to get its nutrients another way! It’s semi-parasitic on mycorrhizal fungi in the soil.
I was inspired to go find the White Helleborine in Friston Forest near Seaford where I live in East Sussex on the south coast of England after reading this article observing local counts of the wildflower alongside spottings of fungi. I visited in the third week of May.
As you can see from the pic below, the leaves are heavily ribbed and oval in shape, being up to 10cm long, and each stem bears about five of them.
Cephalanthera damasonium flowers
Another common name of White Helleborine is Poached Egg Plant because the flowers are creamy white opening to a yellow lip as seen in top image. However the yellow flower parts are not always seen as the flower doesn’t need to open fully due to being adapted to self-pollination.
The stems I saw had between two and six flowers. The buds were about one centimetre across, the occasional one opening to about two centimetres.
These Helleborines could be differentiated from Narrow-leaved Helleborines, which also have white flowers, in that the latter have long thin lance-shaped leaves.
Other Helleborines are in the genus Epipactis and have a separate page.
Blog posts mentioning Helleborines – Cephalanthera are tagged Helleborine or Cephalanthera
https://photographingwildflowers.co.uk/tag/helleborine/
https://photographingwildflowers.co.uk/tag/cephalanthera
2021 was a particularly good year for orchids in my neck of the woods!