Homage to Buttercups

For as long as I can remember, I’ve always hated yellow flowers. The one request I had when my wedding bouquet of Gerbera Daisies was being made was NO yellow! Ironically the day of our wedding the backdrop to our photos was a sea of yellow flowers, but I didn’t mind in the end, as they provided a perfect contrast to our whites and khakis, and the non-yellow vibrant flowers we wore and held.

This year has seen a bumper crop of buttercups. It has been a cool and wet spring, so where there’s normally just a charming tiny little patch of them below our deck, creating a light groundcover, this year they took over the Plum Garden and grew to heights never seen before! Some of them were over 2′ tall! Today Brent climbed gingerly amongst the more tender perennials that were trying in vain to breach through them to the light, and rooted the buttercups out. We waited till they were in full bloom for at least a week to give the bees a feast, and make it easier to identify. I’m generally fine with well behaving weedy flowers, but if you start suffocating everything else, you gotta go!

Last week we had torrential rains that knocked the newly opened gorgeous balls of purple alliums over, and drenched the last of the tulips, so I salvaged what I could, and the only other thing tall enough to accompany the little bouquet was – you guessed it – buttercups! Plantnet ID says they are meadow buttercups, and this bouquet will hopefully be the last of them in the Plum Garden. The well behaved little ground cover ones below the deck have been spared – for this year anyway. The pretty blue vase is a hand blown glass vase that I inherited from my mom after she died – fitting to use it just after Mother’s Day.