How to save the planet? For Ben Jacob, it means single-handedly ‘rescuing’ live orchid plants from housing-development sites, usually at dawn, always alone and sometimes at risk to life and liberty. At least, that’s how his book’s heroic narrative presents it.

Eco-writing has been all the rage for some time now, and it has gone through several phases, each of which has reflected the growing general trend in non-fiction for personalised narratives. (Leave aside for a moment the fact that filtering everything through an individual human’s perspective is the epitome of the Anthropocene in action.) In the vanguard marched the wind-blown psychogeographers, the local ecology often being made to reflect their own psychological states. Then there were the doomsayers, prophets in the wilderness rewriting Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring for a new generation. Next came more emotionally intimate writers, tremulously identifying with specific animals, places or rivers, apparently in a bid for inner peace and acceptance (this has probably been the most successful strand, in terms of sales, reviews and literary prizes, with H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald being the prime example). More recently we have seen the rise of the aspirational eco-manual, in which the focus is on rewilding, meadow experimentation and retro-agriculture; the genre encompasses books by owners of large estates with portfolios that include wolf reintroduction and organic honey production. And now there is the messianic eco-activist quest narrative, where an outraged individual takes the environment into his or her own hands, with many a setback and epiphany along the way. This last category is squarely where The Orchid Outlaw belongs.

Jacob tells us many times that he is ‘saving’ Britain’s native orchid population (which consists of fifty-one species, many endangered) at considerable personal risk. The problem is that orchids are fussy in terms of habitat and die out easily. Many have difficulty propagating themselves (even Darwin was flummoxed as to why). It means that species such as the rare Monkey Orchid, whose flowers really do look like little monkeys, and the rarest of all, the aptly named Ghost Orchid (last seen in Britain in 2009), find themselves nearing extinction in the wild. You can’t buy wild orchids from nurseries and their low-key charms are in any case somewhat recherché – ‘quirky, surprising, unconventional’, as Jacob puts it. The orchid has always been a
connoisseur’s plant.

The ‘guerrilla orchid rewilder’ dodges security guards in hi-vis jackets and worries about the police arresting him (they never do). These forays become repetitive, the only real difference between each one being the orchid species he is hunting, which Jacob sometimes describes with aplomb. Greater Butterfly Orchids, for example, are ‘luminous’ by moonlight, attracting moths: ‘drawn to their ethereal glow, scent and nectar’, they ‘rest their foreheads against the sepals and petals which curve over the opening to the nectary’. The most dangerous encounter is with a herd of longhorn cattle which, obviously distressed by Jacob’s presence, chase the author out of a field (he loses his sunglasses in the process). The least threatening episode is when his trainers start to sink into soft sand on the dunes.

The narrator’s status as a heroic outlaw is undermined by the near-total failure of his efforts to transplant his ‘saved’ orchids, nearly all of which die. He learns the hard way that these delicate organisms depend on the composition of the soil as much as anything else. You can’t simply replant an orchid and hope for the best without ascertaining whether the habitat is exactly right. But that turns out to be less important than the quest itself. As is so often the case, hubris is accompanied by grandiosity: ‘Having saved them from destruction, I decided to bring a few of Britain’s most captivating flowers back to the people.’

The title of the book and the dust-jacket blurb suggest that we might have some fun along the way. We are informed archly that the author lives ‘in an undisclosed location deep in the West Country’, presumably so that no one will come to arrest him. Alas, there is very little humour, insight or cultural context. Right at the end of this minutely detailed memoir – in which we learn much, perhaps too much, about the travails of orchid propagation – there is a glimpse of the kind of book this could have been, with a short peroration on Ian Fleming’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. In one scene, James Bond notices an orchid – an autumn lady’s-tresses – in a jar on M’s desk, which M claims came from a botanist called Summerhayes at Kew. This was a real botanist, it transpires, a fact which leads the author into a discussion of a cultish clan of 1950s orchid obsessives. There could have been more of this sort of thing. The orchids are purportedly the focus here; the truth, however, is that it’s ‘all about me’.