GREAT risks have been run to bring you this column. I have risked being bitten by a snake, risked having my house struck by lightning and risked causing displeasure to the fairies just to bring you this flowery titbit.

It started a week or so ago when, driving down Blackwell bank on the A66 on the outskirts of Darlington, I noticed that a green grass verge had developed a creamish wash.

As I sped past, I couldn’t see which plant was responsible for the colouring, but I could see that it was standing head and shoulders above the low-lying dandelions.

I haven’t spotted any similar scenes on my pootles around south Durham and North Yorkshire in the last week, so yesterday I returned to Blackwell bank, as the road dips to the Tees, for further inspection.

The dandelions are now roaring upwards, but the flower is still proudly above them. And it isn’t creamish, as I thought from the blur of the car, but a very light lilac.

This is where I now realise I took my life in my hands. I picked a stem and took it home for further research. Books revealed that some people call it lady’s smock, others call it milkmaids, but most know it as the cuckooflower.

In Austria, they say that anyone who picks a cuckooflower will be bitten by an adder. In Germany, they say that anyone who brings a cuckooflower indoors will have his house struck by lightning. In this country, they say that the cuckooflower is sacred to the fairies so it is bad luck to bring it indoors.

Oh dear.

There are two 16th Century theories about the origin of the cuckooflower’s name. The first is it that it can get covered in cuckoospit, which has nothing to do with cuckoos. It is produced by the young of a sap-sucking insect called the froghopper – an athletic fellow who can leap 70cms vertically.

The second is that the cuckooflower blooms in late April, a sure sign that the call of the cuckoo will soon be heard echoing across the meadows.

The arrival of the cuckoo, the herald of spring, might have been worth naming a plant after in the 16th Century, but I haven’t heard a cuckoo in the Darlington area for at least ten years (the last cuckoo I heard was at Reeth four, maybe five, years ago, but then I do spend most of my time indoors, hiding from adders).

The cuckoo has declined 65 per cent since the 1980s, and no one really knows why.

Nowadays the most noticeable herald of spring is not the sound of the cuckoo but the sickly sweet smell of oil seed rape which has in the last few days settled on the countryside, obliterating almost every other scent.

So future generations may look at the creamish washes of cuckooflowers growing on damp verges and not be able to associate it with the two-syllable call of the fiendish bird which lays its eggs in other people’s nests.

But at least I’ve reached the end of the column unscathed – although there are dark clouds gathering outside the window. I do hope it is not a thunderhead.