Cuckoo Flower

Lady's Smock, May Blob or Cuckoo Flower (Cardamine pratensis)  is a plant that likes to grow in damp hollows.

Geoffrey Grigson in An Englishman's Flora says of it:  

" a spring flower associated with milkmaids and their smocks: Old English lustmoce. In the Middle Ages 'smock' was used coarsely as in the modern word 'skirt'."

Shakespeare certainly picked up this identification:

When daisies pied and violets blue

And lady-smocks all silver white

And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue

Do paint the meadows with delight,

The cuckoo then on every tree

Mocks married men, for thus sings he:

'Cuckoo, cuckoo - O word of fear,

Unpleasing to a married ear!

When shepherds pipe on oaten straws,

And merry larks are ploughman's clocks;

When turtles tread, and rooks and daws,

And maidens bleach their summer smocks;

The cuckoo then on every tree

Mocks married men, for thus sings he:

'Cuckoo;

Cuckoo, cuckoo' O word of fear,

Unpleasing to a married ear!

But the association with May rites and what went as part of the 'May Games' is dealt with  even more overtly in a poem on this complementary blog:

The Fern Law of Faery

Here we more modestly note this translation from a sixteenth century Irish poem:

Tender cress and cuckoo flower:

And curly-haired, fair-headed maids,

Sweet was the sound of their singing.