Читать книгу The Times A Year in Nature Notes - Derwent May - Страница 68

THE GLOSSY YELLOW stars of lesser celandine are now opening everywhere on muddy roadside verges. The petals are often streaked with purple beneath. The heart-shaped leaves grow all around them on separate stalks. Where there is rich leaf mould all along the edge of a ditch, there can be long, strung-out beds of lesser celandines, but in some of these only a few flowers are open as yet, glittering brightly among the dark, shiny foliage.

There is also a flower called greater celandine, but it is not a relative, and will not come into bloom until April. It is a larger plant with four yellow petals and is often found in old gardens, since its sharp juice was used to put on warts.

The name ‘celandine’ comes, through the Latin and the French, from the Greek word for ‘swallow’: it is the flower that supposedly comes with that bird. But in Britain the name is apt only for the greater celandine, not the lesser. There are no swallows here yet – unless someone somewhere has seen a precocious one.