You can choose your friends but not your family, as they say, and families, as we know, contain very different characters, even though there will always be resemblances. So it is, too, with plant families. Occasionally the resemblance is strong: most of us would recognise the flower of an orchid, however different the plant on which it grew. Sometimes the resemblance has to be looked for, as I found when, donning my blonde-bobbed wig as president of an all-drag Women’s Institute in our local pantomime (it’s what we do in the Black Mountains), I suddenly saw my mother facing me in the mirror.
Occasionally, however, you come across a family whose members you could never imagine belonged together. You know them all well as individuals — they are probably sprouting in your garden right now — but you would never have thought them related. So it is with the buttercup family, the Ranunculaceae. You will be amazed.
Let’s start with everybody’s weed, the creeping buttercup, Ranunculus repens, coarse and gloriously, shamelessly yellow. I’m forking out seedlings by the dozen right now. Thank goodness there are other more refined buttercups such as the pretty, double white Fair-maids-of-France, Ranunculus aconitifolius ‘Flore Pleno’. The former is a species you must shun; the latter you must persuade to stay. But Ranunculus also has an untypically fat-bottomed, tuberous-rooted sister: the glossy and promiscuous celandine, Ranunculus ficaria. The flowers look similar to a buttercup’s; you might assume it was family.
But get into the cousins and the resemblances become dodgy. Have you had yellow aconites flowering already? They’re family. Blue Anemone blanda and scarlet Anemone fulgens opening to the sun? They’re family; and pulsatillas and hepaticas and the kingcups down by your pond (Caltha). Here’s one you may not have expected, yet it will be in your garden now, in full, fabulous flower: hellebores. Pick one and look it in the face and you’ll have to admit that there’s a lot in common.
Scattered through my borders are little purplish tufts of succulent young foliage promising much more to come. They are aquilegias, one of life’s great mixers; and yet you would never have guessed that those long, trailing, slipstream spurs were buttercup family.
Advertisement
You may have been putting slug pellets on the first tender shoots of delphiniums, to get them up and out of reach of the slugs’ worst depredations. They have hooded flowers, yes? But they are still cousins. What else makes a tall blue spire of hooded flowers, with leaves coming up the base? Monkshoods; the aconitums. (Remember Ranunculus aconitifolius?) Monkshoods are poisonous, of course, notoriously so, but no Ranunculus is good for you and some people find them severely allergenic.
Perhaps you have been preparing soil to sow annuals? How about some love-in-a-mist, some misty, wispy, baby-blue Nigella? She’s family.
So do all Ranunculus relatives die down in winter? I’m afraid not. You have probably just been out pruning their commonest climbing relative, the clematis, and that’s a plant which, unlike buttercups, seems to offer most colours except bright yellow.
But let’s close the circle. Can you picture clematis seedheads: featherlight balls of airy pipe cleaners. Where have you seen that before? Only a few inches off the ground, in the seedheads of pulsatilla. Small world, isn’t it?
Here’s a real oddity. Never mind what buttercup family members there are alive now — what is their prehistoric kinship? With which flower, according to botanical authority, did the buttercups share a great, great, great, great (et cetera) granddaddy? With Miss Magnolia! Although some say it could have been Miss Waterlily.
Advertisement
Families, hey?