Lesser celandine
Ficaria verna
Family · Ranunculaceae · Poisonous
Read this before the sheet
This plant, or one that resembles it, is dangerous. Identifying is not authorising: no app has the authority to tell you that you may eat or touch a plant.
Emergency
The carpet of glossy yellow stars covering damp woodland floors in February and March and vanishing entirely by May. It is among the first flowers of the year, and it is toxic.
Streams and ditches · Oak woods · Fields and pasture · Town and roadside
Also known aspilewort, fig buttercup
How to tell it
Heart-shaped, fleshy, dark green glossy leaves, often with paler blotches. Flowers of eight to twelve bright yellow petals with a varnished shine, far narrower than a buttercup's. The roots are white fig-shaped tubers, which give the name. The whole plant vanishes in summer.
What it is confused with
Creeping buttercup
Ranunculus repens
Count the petals: five on creeping buttercup, eight to twelve on lesser celandine. And celandine's leaves are heart-shaped and entire, buttercup's are divided into three leaflets. Both irritate.
What it is for
Traditional external medicinal use on haemorrhoids, which is where all the folk names come from. It is not eaten: it contains protoanemonin like all buttercup relatives, irritating mouth and gut and blistering skin. It was eaten in extreme famine after boiling, and that is history.
Where it occurs
Each square is an area with recorded observations of this plant. The lighter background is the set of areas where any of the entries has been observed, and serves as a reference. Note what this is not: it is not where the plant lives, it is where people record it, so trails and towns always look fuller than the mountains. Data from GBIF.
Sources
Community
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