Cuckoo – like dog or horse gets pressed into service in quite a number of flower names. I particularly like “Cuckoo Pint” – Arum maculatum – a spectacularly well hung (sorry) allusion to the presence of cuckoos in nests they oughtn’t be in – if you catch my drift. Among other folk names for the same plant we get Parson in his pulpit and also Lords and Ladies. Geoffrey Grigson lists a couple of dozen names – nearly all of them both vulgar and funny. In my innocence I always wondered where pint as in beer came from; but it’s actually a reference to a pintle, a long bolt that holds a boat’s rudder in place – need I go on? So perhaps the plant name should be Cuckoo Pint as in pin rather than in eye except I’ve never once heard it pronounced so. Anyway, there’s an exception to every rule and so the Cuckoo Flower is named after the fact that it appears at the same time as the Cuckoo is laying its eggs in a Reed Warbler’s nest. Sadly the last time I heard a cuckoo was several years ago on our friends smallholding near Brecon.
So taking up the theme, I have to say that I’m rather addicted to plants that show up in the wrong place. Once you’ve got your eye in, they stand out like a sore thumb and when I don’t recognise them – that’s to say almost always – I feel obliged to find out what they’re called and even, if they’re a bit rare, record them. Twice this week my eye lit upon an unexpected plant on the canal – one is called Beggarticks which was a little upstream of a new (to me) Mullein which I think will turn out to be Hungarian Mullein, Verbascum speciosum. Both of these are neophytes – newcomers – which have entered the UK during the last century on boats, or at least in ballast or escaping from wool shoddy carried by boats. Most floras don’t even mention these floral boat people, and it has to be said they’re quite hard to identify without a hand lens or a macro photo.
But they’re not all incomers. I also encountered a Fool’s Parsley plant growing through a weed control mat on a length of landscaped riverbank. It’s related to Hemlock and consequently rather poisonous, so I’m sure it wasn’t part of the designer’s plan but then, nature doesn’t read planning regulations – she makes her own rules.
How these plants got to where they’re now growing is a mystery; but it occurs to me that they may have been carried up the canal from Bristol on the shoes of narrowboaters. Most plants will stowaway given half a chance, but some, like Giant Hogweed, Russian Vine and Himalayan Balsam get thrown out of gardens when their owners realize what thugs they really are. Unfortunately, unlike teenagers, they don’t grow out of it and carry on terrorising towpaths and riverbanks the length and breadth of the country. Other strangers have replaced wool shoddy and ballast by commandeering birdseed as a means of transport, and among the upcoming means of getting about some are seeking pastures new by way of wildflower mixes. There’s no let-up for the prospective Cuckoo hunter. Apple of Peru – Nicandra physalodes– regularly pops up on the allotment.
Today was/is Harvest Festival day for the Potwell Inn. We cleared the polytunnel of tomatoes, aubergines and accidentally grown Scotch Bonnet chillies, and feasted on sweetcorn which has escaped the badgers this year by being locked inside the tunnel. Now there’s a mountain of pickling and preserving to climb, and we’ve plenty of Squashes to last the winter. It does seem odd that today is the first day of meteorological autumn when we’ve barely seen the summer, but climate damage is the cause of all this and lying in bed with the windows open at night reveals that more planes are flying over Bath than buses drive up the A4. I should think there’s a plane overhead coming in to land or taking off every ten minutes. The Local Council are doing their best – against some strong and synthetic opposition by people who don’t even live here – but it all seems a bit pointless when the pollution by aeroplanes is deemed too economically important to curb.
