Orange Cowslip

May has brought a sudden rush of green growth as the meadow plants push up their foliage in a race to out-perform each other and take control of the available space. The Cowslips are still giving a stunning display of yellow but they have also managed to produce a surprise for us this year. In the grass in front of the hides there is a Cowslip plant with deep orange flowers, the only one in the meadow!

Bluebells

Just a few feet away from the orange Cowslip there is a small group of Bluebell plants. We have not found Bluebells in the meadow before, so this is another new species for our list. We're hoping that it will be the first of many this year. This month we are going to take a look at some of the more unusual kinds of flowers, a number of which can be found in our meadow.

Funny Flowers!

What is a flower? We think of those colourful things that grow in our gardens or wild in the countryside, with their bright petals, sometimes with extravagant shapes or sweet perfumes. But there are plenty of flowers that have none of these.

A flower is the sex organ of a plant that needs seeds to reproduce. If a plant produces fruit, seeds, nuts, grains or whatever, it must have had a flower at some stage. Not all plants reproduce by means of seeds, but those that do use sexual reproduction in much the same way as most animals.

Reproductive Flower Parts

The male part of a flower is called an anther, often standing on a stamen (stalk). This is covered with a coloured powder called pollen. The female part is an ovary, containing an ovule. Above the ovary is a sticky bit called a stigma. If the right sort of pollen lands on the stigma, a tube grows down into the ovary. The nucleus of the pollen grain migrates down the tube to fertilise the ovule, which then becomes a seed.

To be a flower, all that is technically needed is these parts. All the rest is, literally, window dressing. Plants rely on many methods to get the pollen from the anthers to the stigma, including gravity, wind, insects, birds and even, in some places, mammals, drawn by the colours, scents and nectar, or the protein-rich pollen.

Male Hazel Catkins	Female Hazel Catkins

Some plants - especially trees - go so far as to have separate male and female flowers. The Hazel is a good example. The Holly goes even further and has male and female flowers on different trees. If your Holly never produces any berries, it may be a male tree! Trees are among the plants that often have rather inconspicuous, "funny" flowers that don't look like most people's idea of a flower. A lot of them go in for catkins - long dangly things scattering pollen into the wind. Trees that have catkins or similar include Hazel, Birch, Alder, Sweet Chestnut, Poplar and Willow.

Silver birch catkins

Silver Birch male and female catkins appear on the same twigs and can easily be told apart. The smaller, erect, green catkins at the top of the twig are the females, with the longer, male, pollen-producing catkins hanging below from the tip.

Sallow catkin closeup

Sallows, a group of willows, have the grey fluffy catkins known as pussy willow. These open out with their tips covered in yellow pollen. All our big trees – Oak, Beech, Elm, Ash and Sycamore – have flowers and produce seeds. On this page we show you a few of them. Later in the year we’ll have a look at grasses, another group of plants with “funny flowers”.

Male oak flowers	Female oak flowers

 

Oak trees produce long, showy male flowers which hang down, while the female flowers are tiny and dark red, growing on stalks among the leaves at the tips of the twigs. The flowers appear at the same time as the leaves.

Ash Flowers Female/ Male	Male Ash Flowers	Female Ash Flowers

Ash trees have male and female flowers in various combinations. Some trees have only male flowers, others only female, while some have a mixture of flowers of both sexes on the same tree, or even the same branch. It is fairly easy to distinguish between them, as the female flowers are usually much longer and showier than the males.

Sun spurge

Sorrel

Three other plants that are found in our meadow also have unusual flowers. Sun Spurge flowers are flat-topped and yellowish-green, in the form of cup-shaped collars of bracts each containing tiny male and female flowers. Common Sorrel has tall, branched flowering spikes. Like the Holly, the male and female sorrel flowers grow on separate plants. The female flowers are reddish and hang downwards, while the male flowers have more erect white tips. The third plant is Wild Arum, which is this month’s special feature.

Featured Plant – Wild Arum (Arum maculatum)

A native perennial, 8-16 inches tall, common in woods, hedgerows and other shady places. The leaves are large and arrow-shaped and often have purplish-black spots. The flowers are clustered in a column, topped by a purplish-brown club-shaped “finger” known as a spadix and are enclosed in a tall, pointed, yellow-green or purplish sheath called a spathe. A spike of bright orange, very poisonous berries is produced in the autumn. (The example shown here is unfortunately rather past its best!)
There are a very large number of common and local names for the plant, many of which are rather vulgar, referring to the somewhat suggestive appearance of the flower-spike. These alternative names include Lords and Ladies, Cuckoo Pint, Starchwort, Jack (or Parson) in the Pulpit, Red Hot Poker, Willy Lily, Cows and Bulls, Snake’s (or Adder’s) Meat, Bobbins, Friar’s Cowl, Kings and Queens, Ramp, Quaker, Wake Robin, Soldier in a Sentry Box, and the rather splendid “Kitty come down the lane jump up and kiss me”! In the Fens they were named Shiners or Fairy Lamps, because the pollen apparently gives off a faint glow at dusk, especially in places where the plant grows in great abundance.

The generic name Arum comes from the Greek word aron, a name for some poisonous plants and the specific name maculatum means “spotted”, referring to the dark blotches often found on the leaves. The common English name Cuckoo Pint comes from the Anglo-Saxon cucu meaning “lively” and pintle, meaning a vertical projecting pin.

The club-shaped spadix smells of carrion, which attracts insects into the flower cluster, where they are trapped below a ring of hairs, thus brushing pollen onto the female flowers. The hairs then wither, releasing the insects, which carry away pollen from the male flowers and deposit it onto other plants.

The roots, roasted, dried and powdered, were used as a substitute for arrowroot, particularly on the Isle of Portland in Dorset, where this was known as “Portland Sago”. It apparently had a more bitter taste than arrowroot when used to thicken stews and other dishes. The dried, powdered roots were also made into a pure white starch, used for stiffening ruffs in Elizabethan times, giving rise to the common name “Starchwort”. The starch was also made into “Cyprus Powder”, used by Parisians as a skin cosmetic for removing freckles from the face and hands.

Various parts of the plant were used medicinally to treat conditions such as dropsy, sore throat and ringworm, but many of its other medicinal uses were abandoned because its effects were too violent to be safely administered.

Definitely one of our most distinctive “funny flowers”!