English: Cuckoo-pint (Arum maculatum), Compton Down One of the most common wild flowers, and one of the strangest, the cuckoo-pint appears in April as a cowl-like green and purple sheath enclosing a fleshy stem bearing separate male and female flowers, the flower's smell of decomposing manure, attract small flies, which are trapped in the sheath by downward pointing hairs until they have carried out pollination. When the sheath withers they escape, well dusted with pollen to deposit upon another flower. The red berries, appearing in July and August, are poisonous - fatally so to children. The strange form of the flower has given rise to many local names including, lords-and-ladies, parson-in-the-pulpit and Adam and Eve.