Arum a plant surprise in hedge cleaning exercise

ON THIS page last week I mentioned that I’m cleaning up an old hedgerow.

I’m still at it. There’s quite a lot of this hedge and I can only spare a couple of hours a day for the work. Although progress is slow, and I’m only using hand tools, I find it very satisfying. And everything growing in this hedge is a native plant, so my ‘hands on’ approach provides plenty of close range botany.

I’ve just come across a strange and rather interesting plant. A green spike poking out of the ivy in the hedge bottom with its tip covered in a cone of bright orange-red berries. It has a number of common names, including lords and ladies and cuckoo-pint. Its Latin name is Arum maculatum.

It’s not a rare plant, but it does prefer to grow in deep shade in damp places with a lime-rich soil.

It’s a perennial with a large underground corm or bulb. Very early in the spring, sometimes even when there’s still snow on the ground, it produces large, arrow-head shaped leaves which are dark green and often have dark brown or purple spots on them.

After that it produces an odd thing called a spathe. This is a pale green bract, or modified leaf, that forms a sheath enclosing the flower spike, which is normally purple. The spathe also has an insect trap in it. They are not carnivorous plants but they are hermaphrodites and they trap the insects to transfer pollen from the male part of the flower spike to the female.

The common name lords and ladies was coined a long time ago by somebody with a rude imagination examining the spike enclosed in the sheath.

Once pollination has taken place all the foliage dies back and the female flowers at the tip of the spike turn into berries that are green at first and then ripen to the bright orange-red that had caught my attention in the bottom of the hedge.

As far as I can gather, this is the only member of the arum family that grows wild in Ireland, though a couple of other species, one of which is a water plant, seem to have become naturalised in parts of England. Most arums are tropical plants, in particular plants of the tropical rain forest.

Many of the tropical arums are popular conservatory plants, grown mostly for their showy foliage rather than their peculiar flowers. These include philodendrons, dieffenbachias and monsteras.

THE Irish native arum has one dubious claim to fame, it may well be our most poisonous wild plant. It’s not only deadly if you eat it, skin contact with juice or sap can cause irritation and blistering, so you need to treat it with respect.

But strangely enough Arum maculatum was once grown on an industrial scale for an edible starch that can be extracted from the root tuber. This was traded under the name of ‘Portland Sago’ and used in cooking as a substitute for arrowroot.

It was also used to make something called salop or salep. This was a hot drink that was apparently hugely popular among the working classes before the introduction of tea and coffee. At least it was popular in Britain, I can’t find any references to it as a drink in Ireland. The word is Arabic in origin, and I believe the drink is still made in Turkey and Iran.

The tubers of wild orchids are used, as well as arums. But I don’t recommend that you experiment with making salop from Irish Arum maculatum unless you know precisely what you’re doing because the plant is so dangerous. You’d be better off just admiring it as a plant curiousity growing in the hedge bottom.

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