Lesser celandine, Ficaria verna, is a sight for sore eyes. In the hailstorm it folds in on itself, “In close self-shelter, like a Thing at rest” in Wordsworth’s poem The Lesser Celandine. When the rain stops, its starry buttercups open to the sun over heart-shaped leaves close to the ground, it spreads through damp woods and hedgebanks, a yellow splash before other flowers and leaves crowd it out.
Celandine is a name that emerges in the 14th century from the Old French celidoine, from the Latin chelidonia and the Greek khelidonion, a swallow – its flowers come and go with the swallows. The confusion with greater celandine, Chelidonium majus, is also connected with swallows, because they were thought to use the plant to restore the sight of blind chicks; greater celandine was used in both Greek and ancient Chinese medicine to treat eyes.
It is hard to imagine anything less like “a Thing at rest” than the first swallow to zip low across Windmill Hill, making the heart skip a beat. Over the last lesser celandines in damp corners, swallows fly above flowers of little pink storksbill, the blue common field speedwell (in flower since New Year) and yellow cowslips in the open grass; they fling themselves across fields and a wood where the first early purple orchid glows dreamily in undergrowth; then they loop back in a matter of seconds to skim the hill again for flies.
The blue recklessness of swallows returning from Africa, flicking a worm’s head above the ground or swooping through open skies, seems the opposite of the golden ephemera of celandines that know their place and illuminate the common shadows with on-off torchlight in spring weather. Celandines are almost gone by the time swallows arrive but the arrival and departure of each bookend a season bursting with wild energy.
Lesser celandine, also called pilewort, was a country cure for haemorrhoids and the king’s evil (or scrofula, a bacterial infection of lymph nodes). It is certainly a tonic for the eyes, but it won’t cure old age. Wordsworth has lesser celandine flowers carved on his tomb, symbols of a “shining youth” to hold on to in the vain hope that “Age might but take the things Youth needed not.”
