Ranunculus californicus, California Buttercup

Buttercups are one of California’s earliest blooming perennial wildflowers, lighting up many natural landscapes soon after the rains begin. The plant produces a rather delicate rosette of leaves before send­ing up multiple flowering stalks 6–15” tall.

Buttercups grow naturally in moist sites in open grasslands, and in partially shaded sites at the canopy edges of trees. They are easy to cultivate and most effective planted in mass. Mix them with fescue and Blue-Eyed Grass in a meadow-style planting. They’ll bloom well with reg­ular garden water but are longer-lived if allowed a dry-season dormancy. Buttercups often reseed freely. Deer generally ignore the plant, although they do sometimes eat the flowers.

Plant at the front of the border and in meadows with native annuals, grasses and bulbs, blue-eyed grass, shooting stars, woolly blue-curls, and other natives that require little, if any, supplemental summer irrigation. By mid-summer the flowers have shed seed, and the plant is dormant. New seedlings readily volunteer in late winter to spring. Propagate easily by seed.