An early start for Lesser Celandines

 Almost as soon as the snow melted rosettes of marbled, spoon-shaped leaves of lesser celandine  Ficaria verna have unfurled and lie flat against the soil, intercepting every available photon of weak January sunshine.

Every year, this ambitious wild flower appears somewhere new in our garden. The particular form that grows here is subspecies bulbifera, which reproduces via detachable buds called bulbils, about the size of a rice grain, that form in leaf stalk bases. By early summer the celandines will have withered, leaving these propagules on the soil surface, dormant until spring. Then they quickly produce deep roots and new leaves and, where there was one plant, there will be many cloned copies of their parent.

Lifting them reveals the haemorrhoid-shaped underground tubers which, in accordance with the ancient doctrine of signatures indicated its medicinal virtues and conferred its apothecary’s name, pilewort. “Bathed with the juice mixed with wine or with the sick man’s urine, [piles] are drawn together and dried up, and the pain quite taken away,” wrote John Gerard , the The Herbal in 1597..

For years, I’ve inadvertently transported bulbils around in mud on my boots. To a pernickety gardener, this proliferation of pilewort might seem a pain in the bum, but my aching back knows that there’s now no hope of digging it all out; nor would I want to. I like the idea of its starry yellow flowers blooming in my footsteps, providing pollen and nectar for tawny mining bees, bee flies and the first butterflies emerging from hibernation in spring.