Nature · Wildflowers & flowers

Lesser celandine

Flowers February to May

Ficaria verna — Ranunculaceae

The lesser celandine is the glossy yellow buttercup relative that sheets woodland floors, damp hedgebanks and churchyards from late winter, often the first real colour of the year. It is Wordsworth's flower: he wrote three poems to it, and by a well-known blunder the quite unrelated greater celandine was carved on his memorial. Its old name pilewort, and its genus name, both refer to the fig-shaped tubers at its root.

How to spot them

▸Eight to twelve narrow, varnished-looking yellow petals — far more than a buttercup's five
▸Three sepals only, and the flower shuts up and droops in dull weather or before rain
▸Long-stalked, heart-shaped, dark glossy leaves, often marbled with paler blotches
▸Low mats on damp ground: woodland, hedgebanks, streamsides and churchyards, February to May
▸Dies back completely by early summer, leaving pale fig-shaped root tubers and often bulbils in the leaf axils

How to know it

Eight to twelve varnished narrow yellow petals over heart-shaped glossy leaves; the flower shuts before rain

Lesser celandine — Ficaria verna.

Wordsworth wrote three poems to this flower, yet the wrong species was carved on his memorial in Grasmere church

Lesser celandine — the greater celandine, Chelidonium majus, a poppy relative, was carved instead.

Its old name pilewort and its genus name both come from the fig-shaped tubers at its root

Ficaria verna, from Latin ficus, a fig — the tubers were thought to resemble haemorrhoids and so to cure them.

A buttercup relative with only three sepals, formerly placed in Ranunculus

Lesser celandine — Ficaria verna, once Ranunculus ficaria.

Sometimes called the spring messenger; Gilbert White timed its first flowering, traditionally around 21 February

Lesser celandine.

Not related to the plant of the same name with four petals and orange sap, which belongs to the poppy family

Lesser celandine versus greater celandine (Chelidonium majus).

Exported to North America as a garden plant, it is now an invasive weed of woodland there, spreading by tubers and bulbils

Lesser celandine — 'fig buttercup' in the United States.

Quick-fire facts

•Family Ranunculaceae; Ficaria verna, long known as Ranunculus ficaria
•The name celandine comes from Greek chelidon, a swallow, from the belief that the flowers opened when swallows arrived
•The greater celandine, Chelidonium majus, is in the poppy family Papaveraceae — four petals and acrid orange latex — and is not a relative
•Wordsworth wrote three poems on the lesser celandine; the memorial carving in St Oswald's, Grasmere, shows the greater celandine by mistake
•Traditionally used as pilewort against haemorrhoids, on the doctrine of signatures
•Poisonous when raw, containing protoanemonin, like its buttercup relatives
•Reproduces largely vegetatively from root tubers and axillary bulbils, which is why it is so hard to weed out
•Listed as an invasive species in much of the eastern United States, where it is called fig buttercup

Drill it — 8 cards

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Sources

Woodland Trust — Lesser celandine (Ficaria verna)