A name given to various wild flowers which are in bloom when the cuckoo is heard. a. The Lady’s Smock, Cardamine pratensis, a cruciferous plant common in meadows.
1578. Lyte, Dodoens, V. lx. 625. Called … in Englishe, the lesser Watercresse, and Coccow flowers.
1772–84. Cook, Voy. (1790), I. 40. Scurvy-grass … resembles the English Cuckoo flower, or lady’s smock.
1833. Tennyson, Poems, 38. Each quaintly-folded cuckoopint And silver-paly cuckoo flower.
b. The Ragged Robin, Lychnis Flos-cuculi.
1629. Parkinson, Paradisi in Sole, xxxviii. 256. Some call them in English Crowflowers, and Cuckowe flowers, and some call the double hereof, The Faire Maide of France.
1727. J. Lightfoot, Flora Scot., I. 239. Meadow Pinks, Wild Williams, Cuckow Flower, or Ragged Robbins.
1861. Miss Pratt, Flower. Pl., I. 227.
c. Also applied locally to Orchis mascula and O. Morio; Red Campion, Lychnis diurna; Greater Stitchwort, Stellaria Holostea; the Cuckoo-pint; Wood Sorrel; Wild Hyacinth, and others. See Britten and Holland, Plant Names.
1605. Shaks., Lear, IV. iv. 4. With Hardokes, Hemlocke, Nettles, Cuckoo flowres, Darnell, and all the idle weedes that grow In our sustaining Corne.
1802. Wordsw., Foresight. Here are daisies … Pansies, and the cuckoo-flower.
1820. Clare, Rural Life (ed. 3), 208. Where peep the gaping, speckled cuckoo-flowers.
1865. Cornh. Mag., July, 34. The orchis is his ‘cuckoo-flower,’ because it blossoms when the cuckoo is first heard.
