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I love 'buttered popcorn' ranunculus. I control it with the mower and roundup. I'd never put it with a delicate plant but it does nicely as a quick groundcover after I install my elephant ear or an annual in an isolated garden. It makes a flat bed look "raised". It seems to show little damage from insects or weather. And it trails out of pots with tropical bulbs as the 'Spiller'
Oh, it's a "quick ground cover", all right! It will take over a 1/4 acre in less than a season if left unchecked.
"Handpulling", if by that you mean grabbing the plant by the throat and yanking it out, just simply does not work. It will "control" it, but do little to eradicate it. The best method I have found is to get in there with a garden fork and loosen the soil just as if you were about to lift dahlias or divide daylillies or hostas. Then, scoop with your hand underneath the little sucker (and it is a sucker, as that is how it grows) and lift the rootball up and out. Shake it off and follow the main ste, to the next sucker joint and root. Takes forever if you ever let it get just the tiniest foothold.
Even after all your hard work, the bad news is : your neighbours probably have it, too, so you'll get new ones coming over the fence or seed blown by the wind or dropped by birds. At least, it IS easier to control almost to the point of eradication than field bindweed!
I had to laugh at the suggested control method of : "tilling up the ground and removing all vestiges of the plant". Once you till up the ground, you have just chopped those babies into about 950 million pieces, each of which can "conceive". Now, how, exactly, are you going to find and "remov[e] all vestiges of the plant"? Sounds to me like a WPA project to eliminate unemployment!
In New Jersey we got the small buttercups which didn't seem invasive but now that we're in the mountains of PA, wow, thse big plants, although very beautiful, are so invasive! :-( When I had the time this spring, I pulled out many in our garden as they came up and it was easy, but now - oh dear oh dear!! :-( I am considering just leaving them and moving my perennials to another garden. One cannot win, nope!
I think it is very important to be clear to which of the "buttercups" Toni is referring in her article.
Although all of the buttercups with which I am familiar are similar in their leaf and their flower and also in their habit of spreading by "suckers", many of them are extremely benign, sweet little plants, an enhancement to any garden or container scheme. Other than "dandelion", "buttercup" is probably the first flower name I recall from childhood.
Ranunculus reptens, however, as Toni tries to make very clear here (often sold as "Creeping Buttercup" --- yes, this plant, although on the list of invasive non-native plants in my home state of Washington, is nonetheless sold there as a "bedding" plant in some of the large chain stores.) is NOT a friendly plant. It is native to Europe (which is why, I think, I see too much of it), and not only has no native pests or predators in North America, it appears to have very few in Europe! I suspect it to be a holdover from the Age of Dinosaurs; it certainly has that strength of survivability!
It's lovely. That is why the unsuspecting let it live in their yards. That's why it got exported from here to you. Even worse, that is why "Dumbo Garden Stores" continue to sell it to people.
But it is this specific Ranunculus that Tonio was addressing here. Many others are wonderful.
I suspect that valzone5 has moved from the "wonderful" to a face-on encounter with "the devil". My advice, valzone : DON'T "just leav[e] them and mov[e] [your] perennials to another garden". Once they devour the garden they are in, they will move along, through the lawn, into all of your gardens. Mowing does not help. They just grow smaller, but no less strong!
Wow--I wonder if this is the lovely yellow flowers that I see along the roadsides all over the place, and that I was thinking of pulling over and digging some to bring home...yikes! Glad I saw this article. If it's poisonous to cattle, the people just up the road from us would NOT be happy to see them end up in their field!
Thanks for exposing these innocent-looking little beauties for what they are, Toni.
I still love to see buttercups out in the countryside. Reminds me of when I was a child and you would hold a flower under another persons chin to see if they liked butter. If they liked butter there would be a yellow reflection from the flower on the skin under their chin. Everybody, it seems, liked butter. :o)
Okay, I have to share a really stupid gardener story!
Years ago when I first moved to Ohio, I found a small clump of lovely lacy green leaves with shiny yellow flowers growing in a back corner of the house we'd just purchased. I was enchanted. I carefully moved it to a spot near the back door where I could enjoy it. The next year, I enjoyed it even more, but decided to cut it back a bit since it had crawled over the sidewalk. Several times that season, I cut it back and by the following spring, it had jumped the sidewalk and made its own bed in the lawn. Hmm, I thought, I'd better find out what this is.
However, before I could do that, a friend stopped by and, seeing the lovely yellow flowers, asked if he could have some. I said "sure" and warned him that it spread quickly. He said it was just perfect for his back bank where nothing grew.
To make a long story short, I never got rid of the pretty yellow flowers, and the friend stopped speaking to me!
1. My worst weed!
2. Contact allergy
3. I still dig/remove what I can wearing Nitrile gloves.
4. Only goutweed (came with a friend's gift) gets shot with a herbicide.
Amen to all of this! In Western WA, where I am, only the Himalayan Blackberries are a more invasive non-native. I often wonder which species would win in a battle over a vacant field. Whichever, the owner would lose! Like Jim, I have had some success in getting them out of a bed with a fork and constant vigilance. A six-inch mulch of shredded wood waste and precision drip watering seems to discourage them, too... since they prefer water-logged clay. But in eleven years of battle on my half-acre, I feel like I haven't made much headway. I just chase them from one place to another. And since my property is adjacent to a 265-acre seasonal wetland preserve, I will never be rid of them. At least they are pretty.
