A good effort

Following my experience with Gemini at reference 1, I thought I would give him another go, on a question which has been niggling me for some days.

In the first ever episode of 'Midsomer Murders', 'The Killings at Badger's Drift', we start off with a hunt for a rare plant called spurge coralroot and I have often wondered whether this plant really existed, or whether it was a plausible name invented by the scriptwriters. More recently prompted to action by reading about some orchids called coralroots and I thought this might be something that Gemini could help with. The opening exchange is snapped above. Which I read to mean that he did not think it was the first episode. More important, he brings yellow bartsia into the frame, a real plant to be found at reference 2, but a plant which I have never heard of before and it seemed a bit unlikely that I was that wrong about the coralroot.

On further prompting, Gemini goes on to waffle a bit and I decide that it is time to look elsewhere, eventually tumbling across a facsimile of the original story at the Internet Archive (reference 4, opening page snapped above), provided by the Los Gatos Memorial Library of California.

And part of the answer was on the very first page and as Gemini had suggested, I had misheard, spurge coralroot for spurred coralroot, with this last, with what I now know about orchids, being a much more plausible name. But odd, given that we have probably seen this episode several times, over rather more than several years, that I carried on hearing 'spurge' for 'spurred'.

A little poking around with Bing and Wikipedia and I learn that coralroots are mostly confined to North America, and the one to be found in England is variously known as early coralroot, northern coralroot, and yellow coralroot; one of the orchids which does not bother much with leaves and makes most of its living sponging off the fungi below, as is explained at reference 5. But turning to reference 6, I find it confined to the far north, mainly to Scotland. While the best candidate for a spurred coralroot seems to be the striped or hooded coralroot of North America, as described at reference 7.

The bottom line seems to be that there are orchids which more or less answer the description offered  by the television series, even if they don't grow in quite the right place or have quite the right name. Caroline Graham, who appears to like piling on the details, was perhaps not able to check this one very easily in the days before the Internet really got going - the story was written in 1987 while she was born in 1931 - and the scriptwriters just took her word for it.

In all of which Gemini was very good at piling on the conversational waffle - but still well able to lapse into gross error. Just like us really.

References 

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/07/limitations.html.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parentucellia_viscosa.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Killings_at_Badger%27s_Drift.

Reference 4: https://archive.org/.

Reference 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corallorhiza_trifida.

Reference 6: Britain's Orchids - David Lang - 2004.

Reference 7: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corallorhiza_striata.