Publications

The Garden
May 2003

From tiny protocorms...

A hybridising laboratory, expeditions to South America, silver-gilt at the European Orchid Show and bold programmes for the re-introduction of wild orchids in the UK and abroad - just some of the projects run not by a botanic garden or specialist nursery, but a comprehensive school in north Somerset. Jon Ardle reports

Images: Tim Sandall

BURGEONING TALENT Greenhouse Club members (and their specialities) (back row, l–r): Matthew Buckland, Ashley Kerr, Jono Sage (Oncidium), Jenny Parfait (Epidendrum); (front row, l–r): Chris Ashman (Dendrobium), Tom Savine (Coelogyne), Scott Devereaux (Cattleya).

It may have become something of a cliché, but ‘catch their interest when they are young’ remains a truism. Quite how far a spark of inspiration can be developed depends largely on the skill and enthusiasm of individual teachers. In this respect, many of the pupils who attend Writhlington School, a rural comprehensive in north Somerset, seem well aware they are fortunate to count Head of Physics Simon Pugh-Jones among the staff.

During the past 10 years, Simon has developed an after-school Greenhouse Club from a small nursery growing bedding plants into a programme that has taken his pupils as far afield as the Brazilian cloud forests, seen them mount displays at local and national orchid shows, raise their own hybrids, and grow wild orchid species from seed for re-introduction at home and abroad.

In the beginning

Jenny Parfait collects Miltonia cuneata pollen

Simon’s involvement in extra-curricular horticulture at Writhlington began in 1990 when he agreed to take on the glasshouse at the school. He began Greenhouse Club for interested pupils to raise bedding plants, freesias and to plant up hanging baskets. Orchids, for which he has had a passion since childhood, first arrived as a cymbidium collection donated by a pupil’s grandmother.

Like Simon, some of the club members were quickly smitten by their exotic new charges, and more orchids soon followed, many donated by Wiltshire and Somerset orchid societies and specialist nurseries, until they had elbowed aside all the other plants.

The main glasshouse now accommodates four temperature ranges, and each member of the club has responsibility for a different genus. Greenhouse Club has staged show exhibits in its own right and together with the Wiltshire Orchid Society all over the south and west of England, at RHS Garden Wisley and, in March, at the prestigious European Orchid Show at Westminster.

Teacher Simon Pugh-Jones and Chris Ashman (with seedlings of his own cymbidium crosses) in front of Writhlington School’s silver-gilt winning display at the European Orchid Show this March

Greenhouse Club has convinced Simon it is important for his students to learn quickly about orchids as he finds that their success and enthusiasm is fired by their expertise. Giving each pupil real responsibility in caring for the plants of a selected genus or two encourages them to learn more.

The discipline of regular care (the pupils often start in school at 8am), preparing and showing plants, and dealing with the public’s questions help develop pupils’ confidence and improves key skills like communication. The club is open to students of all abilities, and Simon believes working with orchids has prevented several pupils from being suspended or expelled, while opening new career paths and aspirations to many more. ‘A lot of students now know they are going to university to do botany or plant science, and they will often be the first generation of their family to do so,’ he says proudly.

Simon has also found that the school’s recent high profile in the media, including appearances on BBC TV’s Blue Peter and the news coverage of pupils supplying orchids to the Prime Minister at 10 Downing Street, have important effects.

‘It shows the students they can be among the best in their field, and this has had huge knock-on effects for the aspirations of the whole school,’ says Simon.

He also believes the club is important in helping its members challenge stereotypes in their appreciation of such ‘uncool’ (to their peers) factors as flowers and perfume. There is a certain amount of ‘stick’ from other pupils, but this does not seem to bother the club members. The breadth and depth of their knowledge, their pride in the school’s collection (and their own plants in particular) is obvious.

Simon says the 12-14 year olds in the group have ‘lab skills at undergraduate standard, putting them in a position to develop some fascinating projects over the next few years’.

Flower show rosettes and certificates cover a blackboard in Simon’s classroom. The school’s most recent exhibit, at the European Orchid Show in London this March, received a silver-gilt award from the Society, plus the trophy for the Best Small Exhibit from former RHS Director of Horticulture Joyce Stewart and her husband Donald. Several specimen plants were given much-coveted Certificates of Cultural Commendation (CCCs). ‘It’s so much better for a judge to acknowledge formally that a pupil has done well than just a teacher saying it,’ says Simon.

The show was also a notable event for 15-year-old Chris Ashman, one of Simon’s keenest students, who joined the British Orchid Council’s judging panel in his capacity as a Trainee Judge. His speciality is Dendrobium and one of his charges gained a well-deserved CCC.

Science projects

Matthew and Ashley, two of Greenhouse Club’s newest members in the ‘hot house’ with Paphiopedilums and miniature orchid species.
Pots of gold - seedling species and hybrids (right)

If growing for showing can be regarded as part of the National Curriculum’s ‘Vocational Science’, the project work Writhlington’s higher science pupils undertake at post-16 is much more applied. Often, it involves them with an increasingly wide range of partnership organisations and co-operative ventures.

Central to most of these is the school’s impressively well-equipped orchid-raising laboratory, set up with the help of Greenaway Orchids, Bristol Zoo and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (among others). It contains laminar-flow cabinets for sowing seed, sterilising facilities and shelf-space for more than 2,000 flasks – most of them showing signs of seedling life, or at least a thin film of newly-germinated green protocorms.

Each higher-science student studies applied genetics by making a cross with plants of their own choosing, researches the parents’ origins, and attempts to grow-on their own seedlings to flowering.

Not all projects take place within the UK; in April 2000, having raised nearly £12,000 from a variety of sources including the Merlin Trust, Writhlington mounted an expedition to Mata Atlantica, 1,800m (6,000ft) up in Brazil’s cloud forests. Hosted by the Rio Atlantic Forest Trust, over three weeks pupils investigated the relationships between specific orchid species, their habitats and pollinators, and carried out a ‘rescue’ operation to move a vulnerable Masdevallia infracta colony to more secure sites.

One of the projects, on the physics of the flight of hummingbirds by Richard Hulme and Yan Pugh-Jones, won the Royal Society’s Young Scientist of the Year 2000, and went on to be third in European Young Scientist of the year. Writhlington’s pupils have now reached the final of the British version for three years running.

Conservation science

Fund raising for a similar trip in 2005 has already begun, but in the meantime Simon is forging links to set up ex situ conservation projects in Brazil, together with Costa Rica’s Lankester Botanic Garden and communities in Sikkim, northern India. The aim is that local people harvest seed from their native orchid species and send it to Writhlington, where it is flask-grown, then the seedlings are sent back to be grown and sold by the locals, giving them a source of income without having to wild-harvest plants.

Simon’s latest partnership is with the Eden Project in Cornwall. ‘We will be establishing deflasked seedlings from appropriately-collected seed in some quantity, on pieces of wood to be attached to trees in Eden’s tropical biome, to grow as epiphytes as they would in the wild’. Trial plantings begin in September.

Writhlington has become closely involved in the conservation of the Mendip Hills’ own hardy-orchid species. Simon suggested changing the management of the school’s rugby field in 1994, effectively turning it into a hay meadow during the closed-season summer months, and only cutting it at the end of August. In 1999, Ophrys apifera (bee orchid) began to flower there, quickly developing into a colony, recently joined by Anacampsis pyramidalis (pyramidal orchids).

The school’s micropropagation laboratory is now raising native hardy orchids with the aim of re-introducing plants into nearby areas. Several projects are under way, focused on increasing the success of re-introductions, including another Young Scientist of the Year finalist, Helen Mandley. This also forms the basis of the Master of Philosophy thesis that Simon is somehow finding time to prepare.

Adults are also involved in this project: out of an evening class has developed the Mendip Orchid Group, which is involved in raising and re-introducing Dactylorhiza fuchsii (common spotted orchid), Orchis morio (green winged orchid) and bee orchids.

Enterprising orchideers

Beyond the heating bill for glasshouses and laboratory, orchid growing takes nothing out of the school’s coffers, and is largely self-financing through selling plants, gaining outside sponsorship and grants and fund raising (another of Simon’s specialities).

Year-10 members of Stem Lab Young Enterprise Company (above, from l–r) Chris Ashman, Jenny Parfait, Tom Savine, Callum Swift and Scott Devereaux with cymbidium seedlings - their major product.

The school has recently been awarded Business and Enterprise Status as a centre for business studies, and the Year-10 growers are perhaps best-placed to capitalise, as they already have their own Young Enterprise Company, Stem Labs. Again, their pride in the cymbidium seedlings that are their major product is palpable, for these are plants into which each of the students have already made considerable personal investment.

The breadth, international scope and sheer volume of work undertaken at Writhlington School is frankly astonishing, and shows just how far it is possible to take schoolchildren (and adults) once they have been bitten by the growing ‘bug’ - provided they are motivated by an exceptional teacher. The respect with which Greenhouse Club members treat ‘Sir’ speaks tellingly of their appreciation for his commitment to them.

Simon is justifiably proud of his pupils’ achievements, but modestly cites the support of the school’s head, Marie Getheridge, as ‘crucial; a teacher without support can’t make things happen’. His enthusiasm was recognised, however, with the 2001 award for Teacher of the Year for the west of England.

When pressed as to why he commits so much of his own time to the projects he juggles, he confides ‘my job isn’t like work – I enjoy it so much. Seeing the interest and successes of the students is just brilliant.’ An exceptional motivator, and eloquent too.

Jon Ardle is Features Editor on The Garden

The RHS Education Department has a Schools Membership Scheme and runs regular In Service (INSET) training days for teachers on how to integrate horticultural subjects into the curriculum. For more information contact Jennie Beaver, tel: 01483 212432; mailto:jenniebe@rhs.org.uk

back to The Garden contents page