In the flowerbed near our front door we have a clump of
Lesser Celandine.
It has not been
planted there, at least not by us, and is probably the result of a stray seed
or a bit of tuber ending up in the soil by some means unknown.
Anyway, it seems happy there and it doesn't
clash with any grand garden designs we may have had (we haven’t), so there it
can stay.
Lesser celandine (
Ficaria verna) is, as the botanical name
suggests, considered a harbinger of spring.
It is a member of the buttercup family and is an important forage plant
for early emerging bumblebees as well as some early solitary bees and other
flies.
It loves shade and in the right
conditions will quickly carpet a forest floor with its dark green foliage and
bright yellow flowers.
Its leaves and
tubers are both edible and mildly toxic, so it is recommended that they are
either cooked or dried, which converts the toxins to something more benign,
before making a feast of them.
The
knobbly tubers also give the plant its other common name – pilewort.
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As a buttercup, they come within the family
Ranunculaceae, which comes from the
Latin
ranunculus for ‘little frog’.
Though I have searched the Internet for a
better explanation, the concensus seems to be that it is called little frog
because buttercups live near water like frogs do.
There must be a better explanation than that,
mustn’t there?
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| Lesser Celandine closed |
Talking of explanations, you may have noticed another
feature of lesser celandine – the flowers close by mid-afternoon and don’t open
again until the following morning. There
are several plant species that do this, one of the most striking is goat’s-beard,
which has the alternative name – ‘Jack go to bed at noon’ because it is never
open in the afternoon. Apparently there
are some specialist cells at the base of the petals in a structure call the
pulvinis. The chemistry of these cells
changes so that they swell or contract to move the petals open or closed. It is thought that this is a response to
temperature changes and possibly daylight as well because on cold dull days the
petals don’t open at all. The big
question, of course, is why does the flower need to close anyway? Why not display itself to passing pollinators
all the time? Perhaps the plant doesn’t
want to attract pollinators when there is not enough energy from the sun to
produce nectar, or maybe it is to avoid damage from sudden frosts. The fact is that nobody yet seems to know. Incidentally, the word that describes this process
for both petals and leaves is ‘nictinasty’!
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| The faintly variegated leaf of Lesser Celandine |
If you have followed this column for any length of time you
will know that I’m always banging on about threats to our wildlife, loss of
habitat, pesticides, insect declines, etc.
But it seems that I’m not alone.
I found this quote from a speech at a conference on biodiversity given
by Ireland’s president Michael Higgins recently and just had to share it with
you.
“Around the world, the library of life that has evolved over
billions of years – our biodiversity – is being destroyed, poisoned, polluted,
invaded, fragmented, plundered, drained and burned at a rate not seen in human
history - If we were coal miners we’d be up to our waists in dead canaries.”
