Flower for the Day Cuckoo Pint 5-18-26

Well here is a new one to start the week. Jan has been watching a plant we have not seen before in a meadow circle. How it got there is a good question . It has interesting leaves and when we looked it up it is called cuckoo pint (Arum maculatum) and is in the family Araceae. It has multiple names including Jack in the pulpit. The leaves are triangular with an arrow-head shape at the base. The leaves have a long stalk and the network veins.  Below flowers are borne on a poker shape inflorescence called a spadix, which is enclosed in a pale green leaf-like hood called a spathe.  Arum maculatum is known as cuckoo pint or cuckoo-pint in the British Isles and is named thus in Nicholas Culpeper’s famous 17th-century herbal book. "Pint" is a shortening of the word "pintle", meaning penis, derived from the shape of the spadix. The euphemistic shortening has been traced to Turner in 1551. In order to see the pint I had to open up the pale green leafy spathe. What fun and how great to have Jan show me the way here. She is always full of surprises. Arum Maculatum Seduced on a damp woodland bank the lily lantern glows. Inside the green hood the purple spike protrudes. A shower of glossy leaves shoots arrows to the ground. The cowl calls to insects and traps them until dusk when they are released to carry the fairy pollen to another spadix. It shimmers as they escape. Lords and ladies. So emphatically a lord’s pintle and a lady’s vulva— Arum maculatum stands in the hedge row as an exotic sexual statement. Willy lily or priest’s pilly sucky calves or cuckoo-pint— our jack-in-the-pulpit flower belies its English bower. More suited to a tropical place the wild arum takes an aroid space and sedately waits until it can shout into Autumn with a spike of shiny orange globes— and blaze the bank with its fiery stalk. Helen Slade