Persian buttercups
With most of the garden pots and troughs at their peak we thought it wouldn’t hurt to start planning their next reincarnation. A friend kindly gave us a packet of Ranunculus ‘Purple Heart’, so rather than wait, we thought we’d find them a home now and give them a good head start. Ranunculus are part of the buttercup family, in fact, the native buttercup we see growing on riverbanks and in meadows is a Ranunculus - it’s a large family comprising over 2,000 species.
The corms look like a fist of dessicated witches fingers and to think that they’ll give us a wonderful display of flowers in a few months takes a degree of imagination. This dried up state is soon improved with a soak for a few hours in a jar of water.
The option then is either to plant them up into small 9cm pots and ‘grow them on’ in the greenhouse before planting out in the desired position, or plant the corms straight away. With the opinion that it’s often better to get plants straight in the ground we buried them a few inches deep in the already burgeoning pots, squeezing them in around the edges.
When the current incumbents are past their best the Ranunculus should be starting to show. With the exotic sounding name of the Persian Buttercup we’re looking forward to seeing their deep purple double flowers in May and June.
