Celandines...

For me the flower of spring isn't the snowdrop or the daffodil and I can hardly be bothered with the crocus (or is that crocuses or crocai?). I'm almost there with primroses, violets, and cowslips, but for me the flower of spring is the lowly celandine. I took these with my new super-duper camera last Saturday walking along the Menai Straits at Caernarvon (zoom-zoom to 18x, 12million pixels, focus, flower mode, auto shutter speed - CLICK).

The celandine is a common enough flower - native to the UK and found in all sorts of places - dew damp meadows, dark shady woods, almost perfect front lawns, under spiky hedgerows, beside cool mountain streams - even in dirty dank ditches. It grows in the shade, in the light, in soils with a pH of 4.4 to 6.9., from seed, from tuber. So it's a hardy little thing, although it doesn't much like the heat or dry and dries up a little in the summer, a little like me, perhaps that's why I like it.

The lesser celandine has therapeutic and medicinal uses, it's been used for centuries as a treatment for piles despite it being poisonous - it's said to have caused the deaths of whole herds of cattle and numerous flocks of sheep.

Wordsworth wrote three poems about the flower including his 'Ode to the celandine (he only wrote one about daffodils). Upon his death (not from piles or celandine poisoning) it was even proposed that a lesser celandine be carved on his memorial plaque inside the church of Saint Oswald at Grasmere, but unfortunately they carved a greater celandine, Chelidonium Majus, by mistake. Whoops! I bet that mason never got his money.

C. S. Lewis mentions celandines in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, there's a reference in Tony Hendra's The Messiah of Morris Avenue, and even good old J. R. R. Tolkien mentions the plant when he describes the coming of spring in Ithilien. So I'm not alone in my fondness for the flower.

Most people mistake them for buttercups, if they bother to see them at all. So keep your eyes open - you'll see them everywhere now that I've mentioned them. But don't eat them even if you do have piles - as Wordsworth wrote:

I have seen thee, high and low,
Thirty years or more, and yet
T'was a face I did not know.

Well you do now.