Like so many of our common plants the humble and often overlooked buttercup is an important part of our valley’s biodiversity. I say buttercup, but there is more than one. There are twelve different buttercups in the UK and we have at least four in the valley: the familiar meadow, creeping and bulbous buttercups, and the much less common small-flowered buttercup.
Apart from the ‘true’ buttercups, there are the very closely related lesser celandine and the water plants spearwort and river water-crowfoot. They are or were all in the same genus, Ranunculus which translates from Latin as ‘little frog’ possibly because most of them favour wet ground, ponds and rivers. With its multiple petals rather than the regulation five, celandine was moved to a new genus Ficaria recently.
Buttercups and their relatives are rather primitive flowering plants. There is no fancy differentiation of the petals that you get in the most highly evolved plants such as orchids. The stamens are almost randomly scattered around the cluster of central ovaries. These ovaries each contain a single seed. Their simplicity is one of the things that makes the buttercup so valuable to other species, they have nectar and pollen and are open to all comers, bees, beetles, moths, even passing slugs.
Lesser celandine’s bright yellow stars have spattered grassland for the last two months, but the first buttercups that you are likely to see are the bulbous buttercups which are coming into flower right now. A robust plant of field edges and meadows, it will grow to about 30cm (1 ft) with ragged deeply divided leaves and deep yellow five-petalled flowers that open on sunny days inviting any passing insect to fly and feed on the nectar and pollen.
The bulbous buttercup is easy to identify, if you look under the open flower you will see the five sepals that made up the flower bud folded neatly down away from the petals. The name bulbous refers to the swollen base of the stem.
The bulbous buttercup generally finishes flowering by June, making way for the two most common species, meadow and creeping buttercup. In both of these the flower sepals do not fold back and you have to rely on the leaves and how the plant grows to tell them apart.
The meadow buttercup is the taller of the two and has very finely divided leaves each one reduced to a spray of very thin leaflets. As the name suggests, the meadow buttercup is at home in long grass and it has to grow tall to hold its flowers high enough to be noticed by passing pollinators.
On the other hand, the creeping buttercup is at home in pastures where it has to keep its head down to avoid being grazed by livestock. Its leaf lobes are much broader and it spreads out with a network of runners to suppress other plants and to create a space for itself. It is the buttercup most likely to be in your lawn where the mower is just a mechanised grazer.
As the name suggests, the small-flowered buttercup is a much more insignificant plant, the flower petals are tiny and the plant relies on insects walking about rather than flying in. It is a specialist of cliff top grasslands and there are banks of it up on Dunscombe cliff near the Donkey Sanctuary.
There are rough-fruited and hairy buttercups too but they have not been recorded in our valley yet. I hope one day to find the goldilocks buttercup when I am exploring local woodland.
Ed Dolphin
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