return of the native

I’ve been watch­ing the seedlings, and now they’re just begin­ning to bloom: Ranun­cu­lus cal­i­for­ni­cus, a.k.a. “Cal­i­for­nia buttercup.”

ranunculus.jpg

I bought a plant at a native plant sale maybe ten years ago. The species gows 18–24 inches tall, is drought-tolerant, and stays pretty showy for a cou­ple months in the early spring with bright heads of these sim­ple yel­low flow­ers car­ried above the del­i­cate and shiny foliage. It self-sowed read­ily with­out becom­ing weedy, so that one plant became a nice hand­ful. That nice hand­ful, how­ever, got run over by a lit­tle back­hoe a cou­ple years ago when we did a lit­tle addi­tion to the back of the house. Where there used to be gar­den there was just tram­pled dirt. Now the first ranun­cu­lus are back, maybe not exactly where I’d want them, but close enough.

With too many of these native Cal­i­for­nia plants, they show up at native plant nurs­eries, but when you go out to the wilds you hardly ever run across them. But one of the last times I was hik­ing around the local San Clemente Canyon pre­serve, maybe 3 miles away, I looked down and there it was: Ranun­cu­lus cal­i­for­nica, as happy on the hill­side as it was back home in the garden.

March 18 2008 12:28 pm | Categories: gardening • my garden • plant profiles | Tags: • •

One Response to “return of the native”

  1. [ Lost in the Landscape ] » live, from california… on 27 Mar 2009 at 6:58 am #

    […] wrote last year about this wild ranun­cu­lus, Ranun­cu­lus cal­i­for­ni­cus, or Cal­i­for­nia but­ter­cup. It dis­ap­pears not […]

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