Eight kinds of cuckoo pint

Lords-and-Ladies aka cuckoo pint aka Arum maculatum is a familiar enough plant, but one that is more variable than it might seem, because....

Some plants have a yellow spadix (the club-shaped bit in the centre) and ....

... others have a purple spadix. Then there's the leaves .....

... which in some plants have dark purple spots ......

..... and in others are plain green. The frequency of leaf spotting depends on location, with purple spotted leaves being much commoner in central and southern England than in northern England. 

All combinations can occur but plants with yellow spadices and spotted leaves are rarest (around 9% according to C.T.Prime Lords and Ladies [New Naturalist special volume] 1960).

So that's two major variable characters - and there's another one. For that you need to look at the way that the base of that cowl-shaped spathe is coiled. It can be........

...... clockwise, as seen from above .....

...... or counter-clockwise, as seen from above

So, altogether there are eight possible combinations of these characters.

For more about the botany of Arum maculatum, click here and here

Ruff Stuff

This cuckoo pint aka wild arum aka lords and ladies aka Arum maculatum - and scores of other names - has been growing in our compost heap. Digging it up to transplant it into the garden revealed its underground tuber.

Cuckoo pint's rapid growth in spring is fuelled by the starch stored in its tuber, and in 16th. century Elizabethan England this was used to starch, and so stiffen, the ruffs that royal courtiers wore around their necks. John Gerard, in his Herbal or 1597, wrote a description of the perils of starch extraction from this poisonous plant:

"The most pure and white starch is made of the roots of Cuckow-pint; but most hurtful to the hands of the Laundresses that hath the handling of it, for it choppeth, blistereth, and maketh hands rough and ragged and withall smarting". 

You can read more detailed of this risky enterprise by clicking here.

Some examples of elaborate ruffs, that would have been supported with a wire frame as well as with starch:

Public domain image source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_I_of_England#/media/File:Elizabeth_I_(Armada_Portrait).jpg

Public domain image source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruff_%28clothing%29#/media/File:Anna_Rosina_Marquart.jpg

Public domain image source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_I_of_England#/media/File:Darnley_stage_3.jpg

For more spectacular examples and a history of the Tudor ruff, click here

It's surprising, given the poisons that are present in cuckoo pint, that its starch was also used as a food known as Portland sago. Here's a description from C. Pierpoint Johnson's The Useful Plants of Great Britain: a Treatise,of 1863:

'The root is thick and tuberous; while fresh, it is extremely acrid and poisonous, but its injurious qualities are capable of being destroyed by heat, so that when well baked it becomes edible, and, consisting principally of starch, is nutritious. In the Isle of Portland the roots of the Arum are collected and eaten by the peasantry, and some years ago a kind of farina was prepared from them, and sold as Portland sago or Portland arrow-root, but little is now made. In Switzerland the fresh roots are used as a substitute for soap. The juice is a purgative, but far too violently so to use used as a physic.'

Needless to say, cuckoo pint should never be eaten, cooked or uncooked' those Portland islanders were probably poisoning themselves in ways that medical science at the time would not have been able to diagnose.

A plant with 100 names

Until a few years ago we had just one plant of cuckoo pint Arum maculatum in our garden but every year more appear - probably because the blackbirds are eating the ripe fruits and dispersing their seeds. I reached this one before the blackbirds found it.  It's well known that cuckoo pint berries are dangerously poisonous to humans but birds seem immune to its toxins, as they are to those of many other poisonous plants, including deadly nightshade.

Cuckoo pint is a fascinating plant in many ways. Most of the aroid family, to which it belongs, are native to warmer climates and include the spectacular titan arum and the voodoo lily, whose stench is breathtakingly awful . Almost all aroids have fascinating pollination mechanisms and cuckoo pint is no exception, trapping small insects such as owl midges in its inflorescence until they pollinate the flowers - you can find photos and an explanation by clicking  here.

Cuckoo pint is just one of over a hundred regional vernacular names for this plant, which is unusual in being a rare example of a single species in the British flora that has had a whole book devoted to it, under one of its aliases - Lords and Ladies by Cecil T. Prime, published in 1960 as a special volume in the Collins New Naturalist series. It's well worth seeking out a copy of this scholarly but highly readable book, in which Prime describes every aspect of the plant's biology and history, including its use in the production of starch for stiffening the extravagant  ruffs worn by Elizabethan courtiers. During this period starch was produced from cuckoo pint's tubers when starch from wheat was in short supply.

Later the industry was relived on the Isle of Portland in southern England and Prime describes the hazards of the laborious extraction process, quoting John Gerard: "The most pure and white starch is made of the roots of Cuckow-pint; but most hurtful to the hands of the Laundresses that hath the handling of it, for it choppeth, blistereth, and maketh hands rough and ragged and withall smarting". 

The hurt was caused by needle-sharp crystals of calcium oxalate which are present in high concentrations in the tubers and in other parts of the plant - you can see photographs of similar crystals in another plant by clicking here.

It must have been incredibly laborious work - last year I dug up a cuckoo pint tuber from the garden and found that it was about the size of an acorn; vast numbers would need to be harvested to produce starch in commercial quantities. Remarkably, the industry continued in Italy (in Tuscany) using the closely related Arum italicum right up until 1919.

Signs of Spring: Arum maculatum leaves

There's a long way to go yet, and cold weather is on the way, but this is something I look forward to at this time of year - cuckoo pint Arum maculatum foliage spearing up through last year's dead leaves and beginning to unfurl.

Lethal Beauty

They almost look good enough to eat - which would be a big mistake. Poisonous cuckoo pint fruits ripening. The birds must eat them though, because from one original plant there are now cuckoo pints all over our garden.

Spring Greens

These golden saxifrage flowers are amongst the first to appear in spring and even though they are green (except for their yellow stamens) they are a very welcome hint of what is to come. These were growing beside a little tributary of the Tees, downstream from Egglestone bridge, on Saturday.

There's fresh new green growth everywhere - these are the new shoots of silky wall feather-moss Homalothecium sericeum creeping out over their rocky substrate, in Teesdale.....

... and amongst last autumn's decaying leaves in a beech wood these pristine cuckoo pint leaves were unfurling.