Celandines
At last the spring flowers are blooming! The first I’ve noticed this year are the lesser celandines. For weeks I’ve been watching their heart-shaped leaves growing gradually glossier, until yesterday their bright yellow flowers suddenly burst into life. Members of the buttercup family, lesser celandines are woodland plants so if you’re lucky enough to have them in your garden, chances are your lawn used to be part of an ancient wood.
Celandines in literature
They’ll flourish, too, on damp wasteland, path edges and under hedges. William Wordsworth treasured these little spring flowers above all others. To him they were more fascinating and beautiful than the stars. He loved them for their humility and democracy too – they grow where they must, more likely by a cottage door than in a king’s courtyard. When Wordsworth died, celandines were carved on the great poet’s tomb, but by mistake they were greater celandines, very different from the springtime lesser celandines. In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, one of the signs of Aslan’s coming is the sudden constellation of lesser celandines growing in a glade of silver birch trees. Less poetic perhaps is the fact that this plant used to be used to treat piles, hence its alternative name of pilewort!
Jonathan Tulloch from his Column Glimpses of Eden in ‘The Tablet’
Bernhard Schunemann
19 March 2017
