Lesser Celandine

Here's a wildflower that wasn't quite in bloom in the picture (from about a week and a half ago) but has mostly exploded with last week's warm weather. It's a small flower, but its prevalence and bright yellow flowerheads contrasting with their green leaves makes this one of the most noticeable early wildflowers. This is Lesser Celandine, an attractive but invasive spring wildflower.

In many ways they have an unfair advantage over our native wildflowers. None of our main herbivores (deer, rabbits, woodchucks) will eat it, nor will any of our insects. They don't require pollination so they can emerge before most pollinators are around and they've got a lot of the sunlight resources to themselves.

So this is there a wildflower that uses resources without contributing anything to the local environment, and crowds out a lot of local wildflowers that actually would provide benefits for our native herbivores and pollinators.

Of course, we could probably unleash chemicals that could kill it off, but this would also put poisons into the ground that would also hurt the plants and insects we were trying to help by killing off the Lesser Celandine. In many areas the solutions to the Lesser Celandine invasion are worse than the invasion itself.

March 31 at Duke Farms

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