What's up, buttercup?

There’s far more to fields of golden-yellow buttercups than meets the eye

- Ian Morton

Sun-hot meadows, the murmur of insects, perfumed drifts of wildflowers: we’re forever in thrall to childhood memories of endless summer afternoons and, most vividly, they are summoned by buttercups, a flower everyone loves. Pleasurably adrift in Italy, the poet Robert Browning still dreamed of England and ‘the buttercups, the little children’s dower, Far brighter than this gaudy melon flower’.

For Henry Thoreau, they were ‘the gold of the meadow’ and, in the May 15 countryside entry of his 1838 journal, he was moved to declare that ‘at one leap, I go from the just opened buttercup to the life everlasting’. War poet Wilfred Owen, killed 100 years ago, days before the First World War ended, wrote of soldiers on a hillside awaiting battle and pondering ‘the warm field and the far valley behind, where the buttercup had blessed with gold their slow boots coming up’.

A favourite subject for artists, buttercups coaxed even the Brutalist Lucian Freud to paint a bunch in a traditional pot. Generations of fond adults have held buttercups under infant chins to chant ‘Who likes butter?’, a shortened form of the 19th century rhyme ‘Do you like butter, do you like cheese, do you like sitting on the housemaid’s knees?’. A reflected glow on infant skin gives the expected assurance.

However, the plant, a member of the Ranunculus family, wasn’t always recognised as wholly benign. In the shires in times well past, it was Devil’s guts, old wives’ threads, tanglegrass, creeping crazy, lantern leaves, good weed, soldiers’ buttons, kingcup, crowpeckle and crow flower. For Shakespeare, it was cuckoo-buds, symbolising neatness and childlike humility, and he bound it into Ophelia's watery garland. Regional names gave way in the 18th century to the generic buttercup, based on the supposition that the yellow flowers gave butter its colour.