Arum

The name Arum comes directly from the ancient Greek “aron”. Philologists have not attempted to give any further derivation of the word although some have seen a possible connection with the Arabic “ar” which means fire — presumably a reference to the burning taste of some aroids. The Greeks had a broader concept of Arum than we have nowadays, and included in it some forms which have now been assigned to different genera of the Araceae such as Dracunculus and Colocasia. A series of plant drawings found on the limestone bas-reliefs that cover the walls of a small temple of Thutmose 111 at Karnak (Egypt), which dates from the 15th century B.C., is said to include two clearly recognizable species of Arum. ^{55 156} Theophrastus ¹⁸⁷ (380—287 B.C.) refers to Arum several times in the two treatises on plants which he has left to posterity. Crateuas, physician to Mithridates (120 B.C.) is quoted by Pliny ¹⁵¹ (A.D. 23 or 24) as having written a book containing colored pictures of plants. Fragments of his work, which must have included Arum, have survived in the work of others, particularly in the famous herbal “De Materia Medica” written by Dioscórides. ⁴⁵ Although the original apparently lacked pictures, illustrations were added in 512 A.D. by a Byzantine artist who probably borrowed heavily from Crateuas’s sketches. There can be little doubt that the picture Dracontion mikron represents either Arum maculatum L. (the English lords-and-ladies) or the closely related Arum italicum Mill., the common Mediterranean species. For more than 15 centuries, the Dioscórides work remained the source from which herbalists all over Europe drew their inspiration. Beautiful illustrations of Arum maculatum can, e.g., be found in the 1542 herbal by Fuchs ⁵⁸ and in the 1633 one by Gerarde. ⁶² In his 1756 British Herbal, John Hill, ⁸⁸ discussing Arum, remarks that “There is not in all the round of Nature a genus so singular as this.” Clearly, the inflorescences of Arum (and of several other arum lilies) have been perceived as phallic symbols from time immemorial — a fact reflected in a majority of their common names as well as in their use as aphrodisiacs and sources of love potions. ¹⁸⁸ Although at present the most widely used name for Arum maculatum is “lords-and-ladies”, which refers to the two color-morphs of the appendix: purple (a lordly color) and yellow (a feminine one), the earliest English name in wide use was (and still is) cuckoo-pint: it is derived from “cucu” (lively) and “pintle” (penis). Of similar origin are “wake-pintle” and “wake-robin”. The “wake” is derived from the Anglo-Saxon word “cwic” (a variation of “cucu”), and “robin” from the French “robinet” (cock or tap). Admittedly, these are just a few of the common names, of which there are at least 60, ¹⁵⁸ and probably about 100. ⁶⁶ Not all of these have a sexual connotation. “Priest’s hood”, e.g., refers to the resemblance of the sheath or spathe to a cowl, “flycatcher” to the fact that the inflorescence traps midges for pollination (see below), and “man-in-the-pulpit” to the position of the appendix within the spathe. It should be noted that in North America the name wake-robin is applied to quite a different plant, namely, a Trillium species, while jack-in-the-pulpit is the common name for Arisaema triphyllum.