Butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths

IN the part of the midlands where I live we had a late spring with low soil temperatures persisting for several weeks longer than normal.

This was followed by a period of drought in May when soil moisture levels were lower than usual. The result of this double whammy was that many spring and early summer plants were late to come into flower.

Then things warmed up and there were showers and some more prolonged spells of rain. Suddenly there was an explosion of growth when the wildflowers seemed to be scrambling to catch up, to make up for lost time. Right now many of the more natural meadows round here (as opposed to the silage fields) are not green. They are a shining, lustrous gold – totally taken over by flowering buttercups.

The conditions must have suited them perfectly because I can’t remember a year in which they were so abundant. Most people like buttercups and these meadows do look very attractive – but I have some reservations.

There are many species of buttercup in Ireland, some land plants and some water plants. Most have the familiar yellow flowers but some are white-flowered. Water crowfoot, which grows in clean streams and lakes and which is familiar to most anglers, is an aquatic buttercup. It’s sometimes called by the botanical name, Ranunculus. This means ‘little frog’ in medieval Latin but nobody seems to be quite sure why buttercups are associated with small frogs.

One of the things that all buttercup species have in common is that they’re poisonous.

Fortunately they taste so bitter that they’re seldom eaten, even by livestock, but there are records of cattle and horses, desperate for grazing, being killed by them. Another fortunate thing is that the toxin disappears when the foliage dries so that hay containing buttercups is quite safe,

But the sap of buttercups can cause skin irritations and can be quite serious. So if your toddler decides to go out and pick a pretty bunch of buttercups to give to mummy, wash the hands thoroughly afterwards.

I can tolerate all these minor drawbacks but there is one species of buttercup for which I have developed a pure and unalloyed hatred. The creeping buttercup is the worst weed in my vegetable garden.

This perfidious plant produces upright stems with flowers on top that eventually ripen into seeds which then germinate into more buttercups. Not content with this conventional method of reproduction, the plant also produces creeping, horizontal stems, rather like strawberry runners, which root and spread new plantlets with astonishing speed and efficiency.

My vegetable plots are set in mowed grass and separated from it by paths of 40 centimetre square patio slabs. The paths are not just to walk on, they’re also to provide a barrier to keep nature out of my cultivated plots.

But the runners sneak across in a day or two and set up bridgeheads among the cabbages and peas. I know, even while I sit here at my keyboard, I’m being invaded.

I’m quite fond of some of my weeds. The forget-me-nots and the dead-nettles, white and purple, the groundsel, the chick-weed and the fumitory are all quite attractive plants and relatively easy to control by hand and hoe. But the creeping buttercup has no positive features. It’s a plague and I detest it.

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