🌼 Celandines & Violets: London’s Spring Jewels 🌸
This 19 March, discover the golden glow of lesser celandines and the delicate charm of violets as they carpet London’s parks, woodlands, and hillsides. Learn how to identify the city’s violet species, from the sweet-scented Viola odorata to the early-flowering dog violet, and uncover the fascinating history of celandines, once used to cure ailments like scrofula.
Whether you’re a botany enthusiast or simply a lover of spring’s first blooms, this article will guide you through the city’s floral wonders. Don’t miss it—return on 19 March for a celebration of London’s springtime treasures!
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Celandines and Violets
The star-shaped, shiny yellow flowers of the lesser celandine Ranunculus ficaria are now everywhere. The plant has noticeably glossy leaves and flowers with eight or nine petals, but occasionally up to thirteen. It reproduces asexually, using bulbils producing patches of flowers that are only above the surface for one third of the year. In the past it was called pilewort, indicating its old medicinal value as the tubers or bulbils at its base were thought to look like haemorrhoids. Nicholas Culpepper (1616-1654), the famous charlatan herbalist of Spitalfields, tells us he used celandine to cure his own daughter of the king’s evil (scrofula) in just a week. Gerard said it was good for ‘purging the head of foul and ‘filthic humours’. Traditionally, it never opens before 9 a.m. and closes by 5 p.m., refusing to open at all if it is raining. There are many different cultivars to be found in London’s gardens and there is also a wild subspecies R. bulbifer with double the number of chromosomes.
March is the best month to try and identify different violets in the field. All the violets mentioned as possibly flowering in February can now be seen in greater numbers i.e. Viola odorata, V. hirta, V. riviana and V. reichenbachiana. When identifying or trying to identify violets, it is important to remember their habitat and smell, the date they were found and the colour of their spurs. It may also be helpful to note the petal colour, whether the plant is hairy or not and the shape of the sepals.
Open hillsides, such as White Down, have spectacular patches of different coloured violets providing one of the most enjoyable spectacles of the month. In these more open situations, particularly on the chalk, favour the hairy violet V. hirta. This violet is rarely white and has no runners. In hedges, at the edge of woods and in woods themselves V. riviana, V. reichenbachiana and V. odorata can all still be found. Early dog violets V. reichenbachiana as their name suggests, are earlier to flower, being usually two or three weeks before the common dog violet V. riviana.
V. riviana tends to clump, with groups of twenty to thirty flowers, whereas the other violets tend to be more scattered. The spurs of these violets is another way they now may be told apart.
The spur of the common dog violet is paler than the petals, and the spur of the early dog violet is darker than its petals and those of the sweet violet V. odorata are similar in colour. The latter species is probably best identified in the field by just smelling it.
