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Ranunculaceae

The buttercup family

Layered ranunculus beside a black centered anemone

Ranunculaceae supplies some of the most wanted flowers in the trade and some of the least forgiving. Ranunculus, anemones, delphiniums and hellebores are all here, and so is the reason they behave the way they do. This is an old family, botanically speaking, and it has never quite settled on a standard way of building a flower.

Order

Ranunculales

Genera

somewhere between 40 and 60 genera, depending on the authority

Species

around 2,500 species

Where it grows

Mostly cool and temperate parts of the northern hemisphere

7 flowers in this family

Everything in this guide that belongs to Ranunculaceae

Anemones

Anemones

Anemone coronaria
5-7 days

Anemones
Large violet clematis flowers with pale centres on a vine

Clematis

Clematis hybrids
2-5 days

Clematis
Tall blue delphinium spikes against a pale background

Delphiniums

Delphinium spp.
5-8 days

Delphiniums
Nodding hellebore flowers in plum, cream and green

Hellebores

Helleborus orientalis and niger
5-10 days if seared, hours if not

Hellebores
Airy larkspur spikes in blue, white and pink

Larkspur

Consolida ajacis
5-8 days

Larkspur
Blue nigella flowers surrounded by fine thread-like foliage

Nigella

Nigella damascena
5-7 days for flowers, years for pods

Nigella
Ranunculus

Ranunculus

Ranunculus asiaticus
7-10 days

Ranunculus

A family that improvises

Most plant families are recognized by a fixed floral plan. This one is recognized by the lack of it. The parts are usually numerous rather than counted, arranged in a spiral rather than in neat whorls, and not fused to one another, which botanists read as a primitive arrangement that later families tidied up.

The most useful consequence for anybody selling these is that the colored parts are frequently not petals. What looks like the petals of an anemone or a hellebore are sepals, the outer protective parts, doing the job of attraction instead. Real petals in this family are often reduced to small nectar tubes hidden at the base, or missing altogether.

That is not a technicality. Sepals are tougher and less perishable than petals, which is exactly why a hellebore holds its color for months in the garden and dries so well, and why the green tints in an aging hellebore are the sepal reasserting itself rather than the flower failing.

Short lived, and here is why

Nearly everything in this family is a short vase life flower. Clematis gives you two to five days. Anemones, larkspur, delphinium and nigella sit around five to eight. Ranunculus does better at seven to ten, and that is the top of the range rather than the middle.

Soft, water-filled stems are the reason. They are quick to draw air, quick to soften and quick to foul water, and none of them has the woody reinforcement that lets a rose or a chrysanthemum keep working. Cool storage buys more here than flower food does. These are flowers that reward being kept cold and sold fast.

Hellebores are the special case and worth the trouble. Cut in bud they wilt within hours, but the same stem seared in boiling water for half a minute, or slit up the side, will then stand for a week or more. Cut them late instead, once the seed pods are visibly forming at the center, and they last without any of that. A florist who learns the hellebore trick gets a flower nobody else on the street is offering.

Handle knowing it is toxic

This family is poisonous, as a rule rather than as an exception. The shared compound is protoanemonin, released when the tissue is damaged, and it is an irritant to skin as well as to anything that eats it. Aconite, the most notorious poisonous plant in temperate gardens, is a member.

In practice nobody in the trade is eating buttercups, so the real risk is contact dermatitis on the hands of the person processing a large quantity, and pets or children with the fallen material. Sweep up rather than leave trimmings on the floor, and mention it if an arrangement is going to a house with a cat that chews.

Drying breaks the compound down, so dried larkspur and nigella pods are not a concern in the way the fresh stems are. Nigella pods are one of the best dried materials there is, and they last for years.

Relatives you already know

The name comes from the Latin for little frog, because so many of the buttercups grow in wet ground. The common meadow buttercup is the plant the entire family is named around, and the childhood game of holding one under a chin works because the petal surface is genuinely mirror-like, with a layer of air beneath the pigment that reflects yellow light upward.

Beyond the flower trade this family is better known to gardeners than to cooks, which is a direct result of the toxicity. There are no food crops here at all, which sets it apart from most families this size.

It does supply columbine, monkshood, love-in-a-mist and the winter aconite, plus the traveler's joy scrambling through hedgerows, which is a wild clematis. If a customer wants a cottage garden look, a disproportionate amount of what they are picturing is in this one family.

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