Welcome back. This is what Wikipaedia has to say about this plant.
It is known by an abundance of common names including snakeshead, adder’s root, arum, wild arum, arum lily, lords-and-ladies, devils and angels, cows and bulls, cuckoo-pint, Adam and Eve, bobbins, naked girls, naked boys, starch-root, wake robin, friar’s cowl and jack in the pulpit. The name “lords-and-ladies” and other gender related names refer to the plant’s likeness to male and female genitalia symbolising copulation.
If you look at a photo of it in leaf and flower you’ll see why. These are the berries which are abundant at the moment.
I met one of my neighbours on his way home and we chatted. I walked past his plot a couple of weeks ago and spotted lots of wood sorrel coming up in the grass that has grown since he felled a load of conifers. Wood sorrel is what the irish call Shamrock and it contains oxalic acid. Not good for you in large quantities but ok in small doses. If you can it ID correctly, try chewing a few leaves. It has a tangy bite to it that reminds you of cooking apples or pineapple to some. Poncey chefs in London are putting it in salads and charging a fortune. I don’t have any in my woods and would like a small patch or three, so I asked if I could dig a few pieces and he kindly agreed. It seems to like growing in mossy areas so I picked four spots in my woods where I think it might like and have planted them up. e’ll see what happens come spring.
Brambles – well I have to mention them yet again and it won’t be the last. The area of hazel that I coppiced and planted has started to get a bit overgrown in places. Although it’s not a job to relish, I needed to focus my attention on removing some of it. I’ve had some success at pulling it up. Depends on the ground and how soft and loose it is. Some come up easily and some are rooted in concrete. The other issue there is that deer have been nibbling off the new hazel shoots. So an hour spent pulling bramble and piling them around the hazels stools might just deter them.
Now onto the tiny pink sausage bit. The last couple of visits have been social events and I was keen to do a few jobs. There was a pile of logs that I had cut two weeks ago, ready for splitting and stacking, so that was my first priority. I was about to get a few surprises. As I worked through the pile, a couple of small frogs appeared and quickly hopped away. Then two small dark-coloured toads, not so athletic and facing eviction from their log cabin, crawled out looking for new shelter. I gently cupped them in my gloves and trasferred them to the one I had built specially for them which won’t be disturbed in future. As I lifted the last few logs, I spotted a small pile of vegetative debris. A less observant person could easily have missed it. Curious, I gently poked it and got the best surprise. A bundle of tiny, squirming, pink sausages with legs. I think they were recently born woodmice and I had just dismantled the walls that were protecting them. I covered them up quickly and built some new ones, using some large pieces of bark as a roof to keep the rain out. I sincerely hope the mother finds them and continues to rear them. This is one of the problems I am finding. Naturally, the wildlife will find any new features I create, either intentionally like the bird boxes and brash hedges or by the stuff I leave around. So a lesson to learn and remember when dismantling any structures and particularly log piles, is to be carfeul and watch put for those little lives that have made homes there. This isn’t my photo but just to show you what they look like and remember they are only about 1cm long.




