After brief, sharp storms, the fields are exhaling waist-high mist at sunset. A lone, aged tractor is making silage and rowing up cut grass into damp lines. It seems odd timing, after rain at dusk, and the farmer is working with the lights off. I can’t help thinking of the leverets, ground-nesting skylarks and grey partridges in the mower’s path.
I walk into the wood, where other lamps are lit. There I find a line of cowled candles – cuckoo-pint. About the height of a hurricane lamp, it has a ribald sniggery of names, prompted by its suggestive appearance. “Pint” itself is a euphemistic shortening of pintle, for penis. It has a pale green hood, or spathe, which conceals the dark, club-like spadix and what goes on below. Were you to take a penknife to it, the cross-section would reveal an interior like a separated pineapple.
Female flowers sit above a well of nutritious gloop at the bottom of the structure. After sunset, the spadix heats significantly, emitting a foetid smell that attracts owl midges. Hungry for a sugary feed, they push through a ring of fine hairs, tumble down the cowl, past the male flowers and more trapping hairs, past the female flowers, and on into the waiting well.
The hot chemistry of all this action sometimes results in incandescence. In the morning, with the food finished and the plant cooled, the trapping hairs wilt. This frees the midges via a pollen-dusting by the male flowers, ensuring pollination at the next cuckoo-pint party.
At a time when impoverished country girls divined their fates from superstition and folklore rather than a lack of agency, Thomas Hardy’s Tess picked these plants associated with cuckoos, unwanted pregnancy and fairies. She peeled them and walked through woods lit by them.
I find three plants glowing with a faint light, and place my hands around the cowl that cups the candle, feeling the heat. I remember doing this when I was Tess’s age, when I so identified with her, and smile at the hundred slow years of progression between us.
• Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian’s Country Diary, 2018-2024 is published by Guardian Faber; order at guardianbookshop.com and get a 15% discount
