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:
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.
