Lords-and-Ladies

Bill Meek explores one of Lincolnshire’s strangest wild springtime plants, found in rural parts of our county.

What is comfortably Lincolnshire’s strangest wild plant comes into flower in spring each year. Lords-and-Ladies (Arum maculatum), with its flower comprising an erect, yellow or purple ‘spadix’ sitting within a pointed, pale green, cowl-like ‘spathe’, is common in Lincolnshire’s woodlands and shaded hedgerow bottoms.

Its distinctive appearance has led to this species acquiring more English, or common names, than any other wild plant; you may know it as Wild Arum, Jack in the Pulpit, or Cuckoo Pint (to rhyme with ‘mint’).
In Fenland, the flowers have been known as ‘shiners’ and ‘fairly lights’, and it is said that the pollen does indeed give off a faint glow at dusk, although I have never seen this and remain sceptical.

In less dispute is that the upright spadix can exude both heat and odour, its tip rising to perhaps 12 or 15 degrees above ambient temperature, serving to enhance the spread of an unpleasant aroma faintly like manure. This is all part of the plant’s extraordinary pollination mechanism.

The pollination action happens not within the flower’s green ‘hood’ itself, but in the bulb-like swelling at the base of the flower stem. Small insects, especially females of the tiny moth fly, are attracted to the spadix’s irresistibly rotten smell, and being unable to get a grip on its oily surface fall through a ring of downwardly directed bristles into the hollow, bulbous swelling beneath, where they are trapped. Here they encounter the female parts of the flower, which they duly pollinate.

Male flowers, which sit just above the female flowers, ripen about a day later (when the female flowers have become unreceptive, to prevent cross-pollination), and dust the captive flies with pollen. Lastly, the bristles in the neck of the swelling wither and a small drop of nectar is produced, allowing the little pollen-laden insects to escape, freshly nourished, so that they may move on to the next flower and repeat the process.

Distinctive features
If anything, Lords-and-Ladies are even more distinctive in fruit than in flower. Its short spikes of bright orange-red berries in late summer and autumn make it comfortably the most colourful berry bearing plant on the woodland floor.

The berries, and indeed all parts of the plant, are very poisonous and should be left alone. Wild mammals of all kinds are said to avoid them, and birds are thought to be the main dispersers.

Geographically, our own Lords-and-Ladies is very much the northern outlier of a huge and mostly tropical family of plants, the ‘aroids’, although a second and similar Arum species, ‘Italian Lords-and-Ladies’, grows as a native species on the English south coast and sometimes as a garden plant here in Lincolnshire.

Lords-and-Ladies’ relatives include the Calla Lilies, Skunk Cabbages, Swiss Cheese Plant, and the enormous Titan Arum of Sumatra, the largest unbranched plant in the world, and certainly one of the smelliest.

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