Road margins and verges are presently thick with growth, exhibiting a miscellany of colours and textures from layers of flowers and grasses. Amongst the thick fronds of white cow parsley can be found buttercup, cranesbill, bird’s foot trefoil and common vetch, as well as different shades of mauve coloured orchids.
On a recent stroll through a local glen, I was drawn to the weaving, rambling common vetch, hosting frothy cuckoo spit which rested on the plants’ limbs. The cuckoo spit name comes from the appearance of spittle-like balls on plants during early to late spring, coinciding with the call of the first cuckoo. The spit’s only connection with the cuckoo is timing and is in fact secreted by the froghopper nymph, a tiny brown hopping insect with large eyes, not unlike a miniature grasshopper.
The young ‘spittle bug’ extracts sap from the stem of the host plant, and after sucking in air it mixes the two and expels the bubbling shield, giving it protection from predators, while also preventing the young nymph from drying out. Harmless to the plant, other names for the ‘spit’ identified by James Hardy in Popular History of the Cuckoo (1845) include gowk’s-spittle, frog-spit, snake’s spit and witch’s spit, perhaps hinting at its link to the menacing cuckoo.
Examining a blob closely, the white-green nymph can be seen safely submerged in its lathered home. Of the many species of froghopper found in Ireland, the most frequent and likely to be encountered is the common froghopper, Philaenus spumarius, capable of jumping 70 centimetres to avoid its predators.
In the archives of the National Folklore Collection UCD, records from school pupils in Cork and Offaly say that rubbing cuckoo spit on a sore tooth is a cure for the ache and that the boiling of leaves on which spit is found can produce an effective poultice for curing burns.
Although found on many species of plant, here in this quiet stretch, the spit frequented common vetch, a member of the pea family which scrambles with twining stems and curly tendrils through neighbouring vegetation, the pinky-purple flowers showing throughout the summer months before its pea-like pods appear.
As its name suggests, Vicia sativa is one of our most widespread species of vetch, originally brought to Ireland as a fodder for feeding horses and cattle, hence, I presume one of its alternative names, horse-pea, or ‘peasair chapaill’ in Irish.
Other names for the plant include chickling and fitches. Vickery, in A Dictionary of Plant-Lore (1995), included a record of children in Co Tipperary eating small black seeds and green pods from the plant as a roadside snack on the way to school in the 1950s.
Another vetch species, bitter vetch, is also referenced as a food source in the legend of Buile Suibhne, or Sweeney Astray, where Mad Sweeney, the outcast king, embarks on a life of wandering, “faring through all Ireland/poking his way into hard rocky clefts/shouldering through ivy bushes/unsettling falls of pebbles in narrow defiles/wading estuaries/breasting summits/trekking through glens/till he found the natural welcome of Glen Bolcáin”.
It was here in this ‘pastoral asylum’ that Sweeney mentions his gathering of bitter vetch for food.
Further along the lane, I noticed a patch of scuffed, freshly scraped soil, the work of a badger on its nightly forage in search of some earthworms and insect larvae. Looking closer, a flattened pathway led out through a gap in the hedge and beyond, the mammal’s route home.
Leaving for home myself, I thought of Sweeney’s wild glen and all our glens, now thriving, with things seen and unseen.
