A childhood favorite Buttercups are one of the most common wild flowers. Their abundant bright yellow flowers are hard to miss, inhabiting meadows, fields, by the roadside, in our gardens, swamps and bogs.
It has yellow, shiny petals, and grows wild in many places. It is poisonous to eat for humans and cattle, but when dry the poison is not active. The leaves are highly variable, depending on the species.
Buttercups belong to the genus Ranunculus. Some of these flowers are highly invasive, while other species are less so. The genus has annuals and perennials, and many feature the characteristic yellow flower that we picture upon hearing “buttercups,” but some are cream or red in color.
These are hardy plants that tolerate a range of conditions. Buttercups are mostly perennial, but occasionally annual or biennial, herbaceous, aquatic or terrestrial plants, often with leaves in a rosette at the base of the stem.
In many perennial species runners are sent out that will develop new plants with roots and rosettes at the distanced nodes. The leaves lack stipules, have petioles, are palmately veined, entire, more or less deeply incised, or compound, and leaflets or leaf segments may be very fine and linear in aquatic species.
The hermaphrodite flowers are single or in a cyme, have usually five (but occasionally as few as three or as many as seven) mostly green sepals and usually, five yellow, greenish or white petals that are sometimes flushed with red, purple or pink (but the petals may be absent or have a different, sometimes much higher number).
At the base of each petal is usually one nectary gland that is naked or may be covered by a scale. Anthers may be few, but often many are arranged in a spiral, are yellow or sometimes white, and with yellow pollen.
The sometimes few but mostly many green or yellow carpels are not fused and are also arranged in a spiral, mostly on a globe or dome-shaped receptacle. The fruits (in this case called achenes) may be smooth or hairy, winged, nobby or have hooked spines.
We’ll be sharing more about this flower in future.
