Nowhere Wood in late winter is a place of bare branches, weak shadowy light and unspoken secrets, waiting for new leaves start to emerge.
On the woodland floor, hidden beneath the shade of hazel and hawthorn, something strange is happening. By April, it is fully revealed.
It’s not flashy, no pretty flower show. Just a apple-green leaf, twisted like a bishop’s cowl. A greenish-purple hood half-hiding something inside. You’d walk past it if you didn’t know better.
The plant is Arum maculatum, but no one calls it that around here. It has lots of ancient names, some of which are so rude that they would make Geoffrey Chaucer blush! In Somerset, it was called ‘Adam and Eve’, but most places call it Lords and Ladies, and there’s a good reason for that. With a little imagination, we can see the tall upright lord dancing with his lady in the flowing green gown.
This is a flower and it is a seed making factory. It does this by subterfuge, luring insects and holding them hostage until it gets what it wants.
One glance inside the sheath and you’ll see the machinery of the deception: “the Lord” is called a spadix, sitting on top of a ring of yellow hairs that point downwards. Below them are the orange ovaries, that will become fruits containing the new seeds. These are the “Ladies”.
Beneath the ladies are the yellow pollen-making anthers, that ripen after the ovaries have received pollen from insects.
Down in the gloom of the woodland floor, the spadix heats up, becoming warmer than the air around it, which attracts small insects. It also gives off a smell of rotting meat and dung — irresistible, if you’re a midge or a small fly looking for a good meal.
They blunder in, hunting decay. Down they fall, past a ring of slippery hairs that trap them in the chamber below. There’s no nectar. No reward. But while they wander round, they give up their pollen to the ovaries. The pollen grows tubes that towards the egg cells, fertilising them, and making new seeds.
The stamens burst open with fresh pollen, which give the insects a quick meal, whilst covering their bodies in pollen.
The yellow hairs of the jail bars have withered overnight, allowing the insects to escape with their pollen load. No harm done, the insects immediately carry the pollen away to the next ripe lords and ladies flower in the wood.
![lords and ladies fruits, nowhere Wood, June. [Photograph: Neil Ingram]](https://blog.neilingram.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/IMG_3322-768x1024.jpeg)
By June. the sheath is long gone. But what remains is a spike of fruits, ready to ripen in the late summer sun. As bright as traffic lights, the fruits rise like a warning from the shade. Poisonous, yes. But beautiful.
The autumn is a time for making food, using its large leaves that are designed to capture the dim light of the woodland floor. The food is stored underground in a rhizome.
Later, the leaves disappear and the plant lives underground for the winter.
It lives on as a secretive rhizome, sleeping through the summer heat and the turning year, until — just as the bluebells fade — it returns to play its part again.
- Each ripe red fruit contains a seed of the Lords and Ladies plant. Birds, like thrushes and backbirds love to eat these fruits. Explain how this helps to disperse the seeds away from the parent plant.
- What are the advantages to small insects of going inside a Lord and Ladies flower?
These animals look like cars parked in the autumn sunshine. They look harmless enough, but they have some 
It’s January 1st and the floor of the wood is covered with fresh new leaves, growing in dense patches. The first flowers are starting to open. Within a week, the air is scented with a sweet fragrance. This is the winter heliotrope, which is just as much at home in Nowhere as it is in its native North Africa.
The winter heliotrope is unusual because it has separate male and female plants. As far as we know, the Victorian gardeners only imported male plants into Britain, because they liked the showy flowers and its rich scent. So, although the flowers make good pollen, there are no female flowers available to receive it. These plants cannot make seeds.
By late October, the last of the visitors are leaving Nowhere Wood. House martins are birds that build nests in the 
Amazingly, for such confident, visible, birds, they have been able to keep this a secret from us. And, even today, we really do not know for sure. We think they fly to Africa, over the Sahara Desert, to countries like Cameroon, Congo and the Ivory Coast. That’s a journey of over 5 000 km.
If all goes well, they return to the wood, and even to the same nests. It is a dangerous adventure and not all make it back. The birds can be eaten by birds of prey, or trapped by hunters.
Every year, the snowdrop is the first plant to flower in Nowhere Wood. It is a symbol of the birth of Spring, bringing good cheer and hope at the end of a long winter. This is one reason why people plant snowdrops in their gardens.
Snowdrops are tougher than they look: they can grow through ice and snow. Their leaves have hardened edges that act as snowploughs and their cells contain a snowdrop antifreeze that stops ice crystals forming. The real secret of the snowdrop’s success is found below the ground, in the frozen soil. There, in the darkness, is a bulb, full of food made in last Spring’s photosynthesis. Like a battery, it is an energy store, so that the plant can start to grow in the weak winter sunshine.
This means that the plant can make leaves to grow in the warming Sun. The leaves make food to store in its bulbs ready for next year. Snowdrops do all of this before the leaves of the big trees open to steal the light, so that the floor of the wood becomes shaded. By then, the work of the snowdrop is over and it can wait for the next winter.