In the bank which supports the hedge, beside this little hanger on the flank of Black Down, the glossy arrow-headed leaves of the common arum form at this moment beautiful masses of vivid green foliage. ‘Cuckoo-pint’ is the pretty poetical old English name for the plant; but village children know it better by the equally quaint and fanciful title of ‘lords and ladies.’ The arum is not now in flower: it blossomed much earlier in the season, and its queer clustered fruits are just at present swelling out into rather shapeless little light-green bulbs, preparatory to assuming the bright coral-red hue which makes them so conspicuous among the hedgerows during the autumn months. A cut-and-dry technical botanist would therefore have little to say to it in its present stage, because he cares only for the flowers and seeds which help him in his dreary classifications, and give him so splendid an opportunity for displaying the treasures of his Latinised terminology. But to me the plant itself is the central point of interest, not the names (mostly in bad Greek) by which this or that local orchid-hunter has endeavoured to earn immortality.
This arum, for example, grows first from a small hard seed with a single lobe or seed-leaf. In the seed there is a little store of starch and albumen laid up by the mother-plant, on which the young arum feeds, just as truly as the growing chick feeds on the white which surrounds its native yolk, or as you and I feed on the similar starches and albumens laid by for the use of the young plant in the grain of wheat, or for the young fowl in the egg. Full-grown plants live by taking in food-stuffs from the air under the influence of sunlight: but a young seedling can no more feed itself than a human baby can; and so food is stored up for it beforehand by the parent stock. As the kernel swells with heat and moisture, its starches and albumens get oxidised and produce the motions and rearrangements of particles that result in the growth of a new plant. First a little head rises towards the sunlight and a little root pushes downward towards the moist soil beneath. The business of the root is to collect water for the circulating medium — the sap or blood of the plant — as well as a few mineral matters required for its stem and cells; but the business of the head is to spread out into leaves, which are the real mouths and stomachs of the compound organism. For we must never forget that all plants mainly grow, not, as most people suppose, from the earth, but from the air. They are for the most part mere masses of carbon-compounds, and the carbon in them comes from the carbonic acid diffused through the atmosphere around, and is separated by the sunlight acting in the leaves. There it mixes with small quantities of hydrogen and nitrogen brought by the roots from soil and water; and the starches or other bodies thus formed are then conveyed by the sap to the places where they will be required in the economy of the plant system. That is the all-important fact in vegetable physiology, just as the digestion and assimilation of food and the circulation of the blood are in our own bodies.
The arum, like the grain of wheat, has only a single seed-leaf; whereas the pea, as we all know, has two. This is the most fundamental difference among flowering plants, as it points back to an early and deep-seated mode of growth, about which they must have split off from one another millions of years ago. All the one-lobed plants grow with stems like grasses or bamboos, formed by single leaves enclosing another; all the double-lobed plants grow with stems like an oak, formed of concentric layers from within outward. As soon as the arum, with its sprouting head, has raised its first leaves far enough above the ground to reach the sunlight, it begins to form fresh starches and new leaves for itself, and ceases to be dependent upon the store laid up in its buried lobe. Most seeds accordingly contain just enough material to support the young seedling till it is in a position to shift for itself; and this, of course, varies greatly with the habits and manners of the particular species. Some plants, too, such as the potato, find their seeds insufficient to keep up the race by themselves, and so lay by abundant starches in underground branches or tubers, for the use of new shoots; and these rich starch receptacles we ourselves generally utilise as food-stuffs, to the manifest detriment of the young potato-plants, for whose benefit they were originally intended. Well, the arum has no such valuable reserve as that; it is early cast upon its own resources, and so it shifts for itself with resolution. Its big, glossy leaves grow apace, and soon fill out, not only with green chlorophyll, but also with a sharp and pungent essence which makes them burn the mouth like cayenne pepper. This acrid juice has been acquired by the plant as a defence against its enemies. Some early ancestor of the arums must have been liable to constant attacks from rabbits, goats, or other herbivorous animals, and it has adopted this means of repelling their advances. In other words, those arums which were most palatable to the rabbits got eaten up and destroyed, while those which were nastiest survived, and handed down their pungency to future generations. Just in the same way nettles have acquired their sting and thistles their prickles, which efficiently protect them against all herbivores except the patient, hungry donkey, who gratefully accepts them as a sort of sauce piquante to the succulent stems.
And now the arum begins its great preparations for the act of flowering. Everybody knows the general shape of the arum blossom — if not in our own purple cuckoo-pint, at least in the big white ‘Æthiopian lilies’ which form such frequent ornaments of cottage windows. Clearly, this is a flower which the plant cannot produce without laying up a good stock of material beforehand. So it sets to work accumulating starch in its root. This starch it manufactures in its leaves, and then buries deep underground in a tuber, by means of the sap, so as to secure it from the attacks of rodents, who too frequently appropriate to themselves the food intended by plants for other purposes. If you examine the tuber before the arum has blossomed, you will find it large and solid; but if you dig it up in the autumn after the seeds have ripened, you will see that it is flaccid and drained; all its starches and other contents have gone to make up the flower, the fruit, and the stalk which bore them. But the tuber has a further protection against enemies besides its deep underground position. It contains an acrid juice like that of the leaves, which sufficiently guards it against four-footed depredators. Man, however, that most persistent of persecutors, has found out a way to separate the juice from the starch; and in St. Helena the big white arum is cultivated as a food-plant, and yields the meal in common use among the inhabitants.
When the arum has laid by enough starch to make a flower it begins to send up a tall stalk, on the top of which grows the curious hooded blossom known to be one of the earliest forms still surviving upon earth. But now its object is to attract, not to repel, the animal world; for it is an insect-fertilised flower, and it requires the aid of small flies to carry the pollen from blossom to blossom. For this purpose it has a purple sheath around its head of flowers and a tall spike on which they are arranged in two clusters, the male blossoms above and the female below. This spike is bright yellow in the cultivated species. The fertilisation is one of the most interesting episodes in all nature, but it would take too long to describe here in full. The flies go from one arum to another, attracted by the colour, in search of pollen; and the pistils, or female flowers, ripen first. Then the pollen falls from the stamens or male flowers on the bodies of the flies, and dusts them all over with yellow powder. The insects, when once they have entered, are imprisoned until the pollen is ready to drop, by means of several little hairs, pointing downwards, and preventing their exit on the principle of an eel-trap or lobster-pot. But as soon as the pollen is discharged the hairs wither away, and then the flies are free to visit a second arum. Here they carry the fertilising dust with which they are covered to the ripe pistils, and so enable them to set their seed; but, instead of getting away again as soon as they have eaten their fill, they are once more imprisoned by the lobster-pot hairs, and dusted with a second dose of pollen, which they carry away in turn to a third blossom.
As soon as the pistils have been impregnated, the fruits begin to set. Here they are, on their tall spike, whose enclosing sheath has now withered away, while the top is at this moment slowly dwindling, so that only the cluster of berries at its base will finally remain. The berries will swell and grow soft, till in autumn they become a beautiful scarlet cluster of living coral. Then once more their object will be to attract the animal world, this time in the shape of field-mice, squirrels, and small birds; but with a more treacherous intent. For though the berries are beautiful and palatable enough they are deadly poison. The robins or small rodents which eat them, attracted by their bright colours and pleasant taste, not only aid in dispersing them, but also die after swallowing them, and become huge manure heaps for the growth of the young plant. So the whole cycle of arum existence begins afresh, and there is hardly a plant in the field around me which has not a history as strange as this one.