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. 

When drinking tea was the first step in botanical education...

When the frogs return to our garden pond (which they did yesterday) and the first lesser celandine comes into flower in the garden (which it also did yesterday - here it is, above), then as far as I'm concerned the fuse of spring has been lit. 

Lesser celandines may be commonplace but they are also remarkably variable flowers - in name as well as form. 

When I first started learning to recognise wild flowers, from Charles Tunnicliffe's illustrations on Brooke Bond tea cards in the early 1960s, I though there was just one form of what was then known as Ranunculus ficaria. 

Collecting full sets of these tea cards involved nagging parents and relatives into drinking prodigious volumes of tea and engaging in a complex system of swapping duplicates with school friends with similar interests. In those days field guides with coloured illustrations of wild flowers were few and far between - and expensive - so there must have been a generation of botanists who cut their teeth on field identification skills using these free gifts in packets of tea.


The process of learning about the natural world is one of discovering that what you thought was correct is either simply wrong or a gross oversimplification and I later learned that there are at least two forms of lesser celandine - the bog-standard version that reproduces with seeds and one with twice the normal number of chromosomes that produces few seeds but clones itself prolifically by producing clusters of small, white tuber-like bulbils, that look rather like grains of rice, at the base of the leaves close to the soil surface. The latter is the one I have in the garden and I've transported its bulbils to every corner of our plot in the mud on my gardening boots. 


These days the Latin name of the plant has changed too, so the Ranunculus ficaria that I learned from those tea cards in my youth is now Ficaria verna and is divided into as many as four subspecies by some botanists. Still, to misquote Shakespeare, a celandine by any other name would look as cheerful on a blustery, cold early spring day.


Lesser celandine flowers are remarkably variable and some forms have found their was into cultivation ...

....... like this copper-coloured one ( cv. cupreus) with pointed petals .....

..... this double-flowered one (cv. flore pleno) where all the stamens and ovaries are converted into extra petals, so that it resembles a miniature yellow water lily .....

...... and the purple-leaved form that looks dismal against bare soil in spring until it flowers and provides a startling contrast to the bright yellow flowers.

There are lesser celandines all over our garden in spring but soon after flowering they die away completely and disappear for another year - but not before the leaves have been attacked by celandine clustercup fungus, Uromyces dactylidis, whose first symptoms are pale blotches on the leaves but which later produces these colourful cupules of orange spores. It's a fungal disease of celandines that seems to have become more prevalent around here in recent years.

If celandines are left undisturbed they can produce a fine display of flowers in spring - like these in the Bishop of Durham's deer park at Auckland Castle at Bishop Auckland in Durham, photographed last spring.

Celandines look quite different to a visiting insect than they do to a human - for an insect's eye-view click here.

They also produce remarkably extensive root systems in later winter - click here.

Underground

This is a lesser celandine Ficaria verna plant that was growing in our garden, which has already produced an amazing network of new roots. While we wait for new growth to appear above the soil surface in spring, there's a lot happening underground, out of sight . Once new growth begins in spring - even while the first new leaf is beginning to unfold - underground roots are making vigorous new growth. If you want to control the buttercups in your garden, now is the time to do it - don't waiting until spring, when they'll have produced very large root systems. 

Lesser celandine survives the winter as a cluster of teardrop-shaped root tubers, filled with starch, and its this energy store that's used for new root growth, even before the new leaves become functional.


You can find more on the beautiful internal structure of roots here .....


.... and more on hidden characteristics of lesser celandine flowers here.