As you can probably imagine, the shape of this plant’s flowers makes it noticeable, and provides the inspiration for the 90-plus vernacular names it has been known by over the centuries and from different locations around Britain (per Flora Britannica).
This is Arum maculatum, a plant most commonly known as Lords-and-ladies, a name that Flora Britannica says is ‘probably a Victorian invention, coined as a polite alternative to this great catalogue of vulgarities’. Those vulgarities include Cuckoo-pint (where ‘pint’, rhymes with mint, is short for pintle, slang for penis), Dog’s cock (a name from Wiltshire), Priest’s pilly (from Westmorland), and Willy lily (from the first Elizabethan era), amongst many others.
Fortunately, not all Arum maculatum‘s common names are focused on its flowers’ shape. In Flora Britannica, Richard Mabey also lists this, amongst others: ‘Starchwort, for example, recalls the era when the dried and ground-up tubers were used as a substitute for starch in laundries’. While you might not favour some this plant’s more ribald names, I do like the fact that the names show that people have taken the time to notice this plant (which people rarely do in today’s busy world) and to look at it closely enough to have imagined names for it.
