Lesser Celandine Lookalikes: Which Leaves to Leave

For many people who have a yard to take care of, concern about the ultra invasive lesser celandine can lead to stepping outside to take a closer look at what's growing out there. 

This is a plant that seems pretty at first, then becomes a menace as it spreads through your lawn and flower beds, then into your neighbor's yard and the local nature preserve.

Here's an advanced invasion of a lawn at Pettoranello Gardens.

As you hopefully act to eliminate it from your yard, most practically with a spray bottle in hand, suddenly there's a motivation to distinguish one little plant from another. 

This post will help you make those distinctions between lesser celandine (also called fig buttercup) and other similar-looking plants, and in so doing use as little spray as possible. 

First, a few photos of lesser celandine in its various forms. 

It can have a lot of petals, but unlike dandelions, they are distinct petals.

By mid-April, the flowers are fading away, so take a good look at the leaf. Invasion of your yard begins with little benign-looking clumps like this, here and there. It doesn't look threatening, but this is by far the best time to act.

Lesser celandine will likely be pretty obvious to you, but if you've been eradicating it each year and are down to a few, it's useful to know other plants that look similar. 

Here's garlic mustard. Notice the scalloped, wrinkled look to the leaves, a bluish tinge, and the strong mustardy aroma. Unlike lesser celandine, which has deeply entrenched roots and no clear rosette, you can gather the basal leaves of a garlic mustard in your hand and pull it out of the ground--something really good to do before it goes to seed, because it too can spread and begin to take over. The smaller leaves closer to the ground in the photo are mock strawberry. See below.

Mock strawberry, a nonnative that can spread in annoying ways, via stolons, through your garden and lawn, has a yellow flower, but only five petals. Note the distinctive leaves, which are composed of three leaflets. 

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Dandelions, too, have a yellow flower this time of year, but you'll see that the dandelion flower doesn't have those distinct petals, and the leaves are not round but instead linear and deeply lobed. Dandelions will invade your yard, but not the local nature preserve.

 

Violet leaves are probably the easiest to confuse with lesser celandine. Notice the arc-shaped veins in the leaves, which lesser celandine lacks. The violet leaves may also be duller--less glossy--than the lesser celandine leaves. Violet leaves and flowers, by the way, are tasty in salads or steamed, so its well worth getting to know them.

Here's a typical violet flower.

Scrutinize this photo a bit. Lower down is the lesser celandine, but in the upper right are two leaves that are similar to lesser celandine, but are more elongated and have ribbing on the leaf surface. 

Here's a cluster of leaves of that other plant that isn't lesser celandine. I don't have a name for it yet.

If you happen upon this one, you've found woodland aster, a native that has white flowers in the fall.

Sometimes I encounter a delicate, usually solitary plant whose basal leaves can look a bit like lesser celandine but with a subtly different shape. 

As it grows, it sends up some creatively shaped avant garde leaves and bears some tiny yellow flowers. I have preliminarily identified it as small-flowered buttercup. It doesn't have the robust, dense growth form of lesser celandine. 

These are the lookalikes that I have encountered. Knowing them helps me use as little herbicide as possible, and save the other plants that increase diversity rather than form monocultures of a toxic plant that's inedible to wildlife.

One more photo showing how those first, benign-looking clumps of lesser celandine, if not dealt with early, will continue to spread and merge into one giant mass that looks like green pavement.

A note about herbicides: Many people are reluctant to use herbicide, but a yard is not an organic farm. You can't mulch or cultivate a lawn or flower bed, or a nature preserve, for that matter. The undesired is embedded in the desired, much like infections in your body. You can certainly try to dig up lesser celandine (don't leave any roots in the ground, and throw the diggings in the trash, not the compost), or torch it, or spray vinegar solution. Better results will likely come, however, from targeted, minimalist use of systemic herbicide that kills the roots. It's unfortunate that some have imposed a blanket condemnation on all herbicides, regardless of their individual characteristics. Think of the spray not as poison but as medicine. We routinely use medicines of varied and known toxicities in our bodies. When seeking to heal ourselves, we catch infections early and use as little medicine as possible to get the job done, and it's the same when sparing nature from invasions. The earlier you catch the invasion, the less herbicide needed, so don't delay.

Other related posts:

Will the Real Marsh Marigold Please Stand Up: A Confusion of Yellows