Greater Buttercups and Lesser Celandine
There is a field near my house that explodes with buttercups every spring.
When my kids were younger, we would go there and lay down, roll around, and pick the flowers by the toddler handful. Buttercup field, as we call it, is where spring finally springs. We all still make a point to visit it every year. There the earth exhales and gives our tired eyes permission to relax and enjoy color again.
One spring while I was working with a wildlife biologist we drove over a river valley and saw a similar bloom. He sneered “ugh… Lesser celandine…” with the contempt one might give an international criminal. I grunted an affirmative and looked around for something to hate, until I said, “Wait, are Buttercups bad?”
My patient friend explained that my beloved harbinger of spring was a noxious weed. From an ecological perspective, it is considered a non-native invasive, a hated garden escapee. Like many other non-native invasives, it was introduced to our landscape as a unique garden feature from another country, then the plant gradually spread out of people’s gardens and into natural landscapes, taking over ecological niches, out competing the natives.
I knew this was problematic because the native ecosystem coevolved over the eons to support the precise dance of pollinator, plant and herbivore. Each relationship is connected to all others and there are ripple impacts all the way up and down the food chain affecting everything from soil fungus to migratory birds of prey. What impacts a single strand effects the entire web. And some plant species are so invasive as to be considered a threat to the ecosystem. Because nothing that lives here coevolved to consume it, these plants grow without limits and provide almost no benefit to the native ecosystem.
So as someone who dedicates so much of my personal and professional life to the celebration and restoration of the natural ecosystem, this new information about my beloved Buttercup was troubling. Because I believed in the work I was doing and the expertise of my kind coworkers, I decided to do my best to hate Buttercups.
Predictably, the following spring, I failed to feel distain in the abundance of Buttercup blooms.
Ultimately, I chalked it up to one more contradiction of my life. Similar to how I only by local, organic spinach and pasture raised eggs yet also frequently enjoy chick fila fries and milkshakes. But there was also a problem in hating Lesser Celandine. The only way really to get rid of it would be to spray the entire field with herbicide. Which using a broadcast herbicide in a minimally managed landscape also presents its own challenges.
I also wonder too, if there is a lesson beyond the contradiction. Now as I’ve gotten older, my certitude about everything is constantly humbled. Including how black and white I used to consider nonnative species. My Buttercup field was once a climax forest dominated by American Chestnuts, well before it was a farm. This little ecosystem of my local abandoned field is like all ecosystems in the Anthropocene, it has and continues to faces massive disturbances that we lack the constructs to accurately predict.
Perhaps this explosion of blooms could be considered scar tissue, a beautiful demonstration of survival. This is a step the soil is taking in its healing, preparing and living in a constantly changing biosphere. Life continues to lurch forward in surprising ways. The ecosystem and our lives are simultaneously and consistently damaged, resilient, scared and beautiful. We are all taking incremental steps to bettering ourselves and our world, seeing our flaws and finding beauty where we can with our tired eyes.
Would I ever plant Lesser Celedine? No.
Will I ever try to stop my soul from rejoicing in Buttercup’s celebration of yellow? Also, no.
Does this contradiction ultimately make be happy? Yes.
Because I am alive today with everything I have. I can love where I am and the moment, yet work for something stronger in the future. Much like this field.