Peter Lawson

Song Of The Creeping Lady's Tresses

The Song of the Creeping Lady's Tresses Orchid for violin and piano was written in 1990 and was extensively re-written in 2015. It is the eighteenth in a projected series of musical portraits of the forty-eight wild orchids of Great Britain and Ireland - for various instrumental and orchestral combinations.
The Creeping Lady's Tresses, Goodyera repens, is typically found growing amongst sphagnum moss in ancient cathedral-like pinewoods, where there is enough space between the pines to let in shafts of sunlight.
Apart from one colony in North Norfolk, it has a distinctly Northerly distribution in Britain, being found in the border counties of Northern England up to the Inverness area of Scotland. It is entirely absent from Ireland, but occurs in most European countries and the temperate regions of the northern hemisphere, in Asia, North America and North Africa.
Unusually for orchids, the bulbs are replaced by fleshy rhizomes which creep under the moss and send up occasional spikes of about twenty creamy-white, sweetly-scented, hairy flowers arranged in single spirals, fancifully looking like tresses of a lady's hair. Although propagation can result from pollination by insects, resulting in seeds as fine as dust which can establish new colonies, most plants within colonies result from the mesh of creeping rhizomes. There is a rosette of pointed oval, heavily-veined leaves at the base of the stem.

The Song of the Creeping Lady's Tresses Orchid is in the form of three short movements - a colour-coding of harmonies is employed, as in other orchid portraits. The first movement, Introduction, sets the scene in the ancient pinewoods, with the orchid creeping around the sphagnum moss amongst dappled shafts of sunlight. This leads, without a break, to a Minuet, referring to the dainty nature of the flowering spike. The final movement, The Ancient Pinewood, reflects the mystery and beauty of the surroundings of the orchid.
Duration 7 minutes