A few years back, when my father passed away, I surveyed with dismay the front yard of his house, since his house was where we were going to be having the funeral reception. To say that it had fallen into some disrepair would be an understatement. I thought the front looked liked the Addams Family might live inside. All the grass was completely dead. It was awful! So, I went into emergency mode. I enlisted the help of the gardener, had him tear out the whole front yard and lay down fresh sod, and my mom flew in from Kansas and arrived just in time to accompany me to the nursery, where we picked out a variety of flowering plants to place all around the borders. Even though this is California, and the weather was nice, it was still the beginning of November and even here the selection of what is blooming is not all that tremendous at that time of year. We got a few small Lavender plants and some Asters, but mostly what saved the day were Zinnias and Dahlias, which are quite colorful and cheerful and still blooming nicely at that time of year; although you all know how exorbitant it can be to buy already blooming plants in any quantity. I think we were also able to find Pansies that were blooming, a childhood favorite of mine. But while we were at it, someone convinced me to buy a whole bunch of Ranunculuses (Ranunculi?), even though they were just little green plants at the time, as something to put in with the rest of the border flowers so that we could look forward to some color in the spring.
And boy, did we ever get some color in the spring! By then Dad's house had gone from looking the sorriest on the whole block to being the nicest front yard on the whole block, and those Ranunculus flowers put on the prettiest display you ever did see! And I brought home great overflowing bouquets of them to my place every time I went to work on the house, so my home also looked beautiful and cheerful. I got a great deal of pleasure from those flowers that spring.
So I recently got an offer from the Arbor Day Foundation for a bunch of these in lieu of a contribution. But they called them Buttercups! I knew I was being nitpicky, but I called them on it. After all, I thought, the Arbor Day Foundation ought to know what the names of plants are, even if they aren't trees! But when I called, the man humbly insisted that Buttercups was a correct name for them. So I looked it up online, and sure enough, they can also be referred to as 'Persian Buttercups'!
But I put it to all of you -- when you see the flowers in the picture above, what do YOU call them?
And is it a field of Ranunculuses? Or a field of Ranunculi?
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