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. 

Dark-edged bee-fly

 

Saw the first dark-edged bee-flies Bombylius major in the garden at the beginning of this week, feeding on lesser celandine nectar. These cheerful little spring flowers have spread all over the garden and I gave up trying to control them long ago, as their nectar supplies quite a few early-emerging insects, including bees, butterflies and hoverflies. 

The agility of hyperactive bee-flies is wonderful to watch. They rarely settle for more than a minute or two. The image below shows a curious feature of the rigid proboscis, which is three-pronged at the tip - I imagine there is a protective outer sheath surrounding the long inner tongue.

Bee-flies parasitize the nesting tunnels of mining bees, laying their eggs in flight in the mouth of the tunnel. When they hatch they feed on the grub of the bee host. Unfortunate for the host, but the bee-flies presence must be a sign of a healthy mining bee population in the garden.

New Year Plant Hunt in and around Durham city today

A second day of New Year Plant Hunting, this time along the banks of the river Wear and along woodland edges and hedges. Nineteen species in flower this time, of which these are some of the most pleasing:

Alder catkins

Hazel catkins

Hogweed

Nipplewort Lapsana communis

Lesser celandine, flower petals eaten by a slug but very attractive variegated foliage.

...... and cowslip, flowering four months early.

The cowslip was on the Durham University estate, on the Mountjoy site, about 400 metres from an area that was seeded with wild cowslips about 20 years ago. Since then they save seeded themselves on various places, most likely with seed carried on feet of staff and students. This single flowering plant was amongst a population of over 50 non-bloomers, all with very vigorous new leaf growth, on a very sheltered grassy bank under an alder.

Spring Stirring?

Teesdale: Goat willow bud scales beginning to lose their grip ........

Ryton Willows Nature Reserve, Newburn, Tyne Valley: reedmace seed heads breaking up and sheding seeds

Our garden, Co. Durham: First lesser celandine bloomed today

Teesdale: Hedge sparrow singing, volume turned up to 11, in foul weather

Teesdale: New fronds unfurling on maidenhair spleenwort fern

Hawthorn Dene, Durham coast: Fabulous display of snowdrops today

Some early spring wild flowers

Lesser celandine

Coltsfoot

Primrose

Dog violet

Forget-me-not....

Dog's mercury......

Dog's mercury has blue pollen

 Spurge laurel ...........

Golden saxifrage

Moschatel (aka town hall clock) 

Goat willow (aka sallow)

Toothwort 

Riotous spring

Any doubts that spring had finally arrived were dispelled yesterday by a honeybee trapped in our greenhouse (and safely liberated) .........

............ celandines coming into bloom all over the garden ...........

........ and frantic frog activity in the garden pond.

Since the frogs first emerged from hibernation the pond has frozen and thawed several times, but the chilly spring doesn't seem to have .....

.... dampened the frogs' ardour.

By this afternoon most of the females had left the pond, looking somewhat slimmer and leaving behind massive quantities of frog spawn.

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.

For Our Eyes Only?

The first lesser celandines are coming into flower around here and it's a delight to see their glossy yellow flowers. One of the fascinating things about the flowers that we find so aethetically appealing is that the natural selective forces that have produced their colours throughout their evolutionary history have nothing to do with human vision and everything to do with the way that insects see the world. Many insects can perceive short wavelength ultraviolet radiation, that is invisible to us, but can't see as far as us into the long wavelength, red end of the spectrum. To grasp the implications of this it's useful to consider the colour purple, which is a combination of the extreme ends of the colour spectrum that we can see - blue and red. For an insect that can see shortwave ultraviolet radiation but can only see as far as yellow into the longer wavelength end of the spectrum the combination of these extremes is a colour that we can only guess at. What is certain is that a yellow lesser celandine doesn't look yellow to many insects.

While we can't know exactly what colours an insect's eyes and nervous system perceives, we can get some idea of how flowers look at the ultra-violet end of the spectrum that bees and some butterflies can see. This is a celandine flower photographed in monochrome using old fashioned silver halide black-and-white film (remember that?), using white light (sunlight).
 
This is the same flower using a filter that only passes ultra-violet light that's reflected from the petal surface. Notice how the centre of the flower - the location of the stamens and stigmas - strongly absorbs UV and how the petals themselves reflect it. This hidden pattern of UV reflectance acts as a target, zeroing the insect in on the important parts of the flower once it picks up the reflected UV light from the petal tips. Photographing floweres using UV filters reveals all sorts of cryptic UV absorbing and reflecting patterns that insects can see but which are invisible to us.

You can see more examples of flowers viewed in a way that insects might see them here