Buttercups are one of the delights of spring, yet I haven’t written about them in the fourteen years I’ve been writing this blog.

It’s time to make amends, so this month’s blog post is about Goldilocks Buttercup, Ranunculus auricomus.

Goldilocks buttercup, Ranunculus auricomus. (There are a couple of Lesser Celandine flowers too.) Late April 2025.

Where to find Goldilocks

Ranunculus auricomus,is a perennial herb. It is a calcicole, a plant that thrives in lime rich soil (chalk, limestone and other basic, often clay soils). It avoids very acid and very dry sites. While usually known as Goldilocks Buttercup, one of its other English names is Wood Buttercup and it can often be found growing in woodlands.

Goldilocks Buttercup also grows on road verges, in churchyards and amongst scrub. It sometimes grows in old meadows too, and in more upland habitat provided there is some shelter such as on ledges or amongst boulders.

I don’t see Goldilocks Buttercup very often. In previous years I’ve found it in woods and churchyards but this spring my sightings were all from road verges here in Norfolk, often in large patches, while out on a bike ride.

There are records of Ranunculus auricomus from many parts of the British Isles:

Distribution of Goldilocks Buttercup, Ranunculus auricomus. Image from 2020 BSBI Plant Atlas.

Further afield, Ranunculus auricomus is native to northern Europe and western Asia, approximately from latitudes 43 to 71 degrees and from western Ireland to the Ural Mountains. In Iceland it is quite rare and has a coastal distribution. It is also found in Alaska and the Western United States.

In the British Isles Goldilocks Buttercup appears to be both a weak competitor and intolerant of grazing or cutting.

In much of Scandinavia, Ranunculus auricomus has a wider habitat range than in the British Isles. It is not dependant on basic soils and can be found in meadows and grazed pastures, even on screes and in snow beds in mountainous country. It even grows as a weed in cultivated and disturbed ground.

Goldilocks Spotting

Goldilocks Buttercup is often the first buttercup to flower. Flowering starts in early April and is usually at its peak by early May and finished by June (note 2). The rootstock of Ranunculus auricomus overwinters with a bud at or just beneath the soil surface, ready to grow very early in the spring, with a head start on other buttercups.

Once you know what to look for, Ranunculus auricomus is very distinctive. Its flowers are a typical, shiny golden yellow but the flowers often look a bit tatty, with one or more missing or deformed petals.

Goldilocks buttercup, Ranunculus auricomus, on a Norfolk road verge. Early May 2023.

Closer up:

Goldilocks buttercup, Ranunculus auricomus. The flowers often have one or more missing or deformed petals.

Leaves at the the base of the plant the leaves are palmately and deeply lobed and slightly resemble those of Creeping Buttercup (Ranunculus acris). Higher up, whorls of leaves clasp the flowering stems. The plant grows up to 40cm (16 inches) tall.

There are good photographs on the Wild Flower Finder, Pete’s Walks, Wildflowers of Ireland and Nature Spot websites. Mike Crewe’s Flora of East Anglia website has excellent photographs that compare different species of Ranunculus.

Here is the fruit, similar to many other buttercups, a cluster of smooth achenes with short hairs and curved or hooked beaks:

Fruit of Goldilocks Buttercup, Ranunculus auricomus.

Ranunculaceae and ranunculin

Ranunculus auricomus is a member of the Ranunculaceae (Buttercup or Crowfoot family), as are our other species of buttercup (Ranunculus). Stace’s Flora lists 30 species of Ranunculus in the British Isles and another dozen hybrids (note 1) and there are around 600 species of Ranunculus worldwide.

Previously, I’ve written about several other members of the Ranunculaceae on this blog, including Wood Anemone (Anemone nemorosa), Pasque Flower (Pulsatilla vulgaris) and Lesser Celandine (Ficaria verna).

Many members of the Ranunculaceae contain the compound ranunculin, which is broken down enzymically when plant tissue is damaged into protoanemonin, which has an acrid taste and can cause a range of unpleasant symptoms including blistering of the skin and, when eaten in quantity, nausea, vomiting, liver damage and paralysis. Cooking or drying plants as straw breaks down the protoanemonin and makes it harmless.

Goldilocks Buttercup is a bit of an oddity. It lacks the acrid taste of other buttercups, suggesting it contains little or no ranunculin. This makes it more vulnerable to browsing than other buttercups.

Not a single species

Ranunculus auricomus is actually a collection of microspecies (also known as agamospecies), much like Dandelions (Taraxacum sp.) and Brambles (Rubus fruitcosus s.l.). The plants can reproduce sexually but they also reproduce by apomixis, where  pollination must take place for seed to form but there is no actual fertilisation. This results in offspring that are clones of the mother plant.

For convenience, we lump the plants together as Ranunculus auricomus but several hundred microspecies of Ranunculus auricomus have been described from the Continent and the 200 or so microspecies found in the British Isles are probably different from these (note 1). These differences presumably explain different habitat requirements.

Much work needs to be done to distinguish microspecies and their preferences. Individual colonies with particular characteristics could be lost due to climate change or destruction of habitat without us knowing.

What’s in a name?

Goldilocks Buttercup’s specific name, auricomus, means “golden hair” (from a compound of aurum meaning gold and coma meaning hair of the head). “Goldilocks” has been used to describe a person with bright yellow or golden hair since the mid-15th century and has been used as a name for buttercups since the 1570s.

There doesn’t seem to be any direct link between the plant and the well known children’s fairy tale, “Goldilocks and the Three Bears”. The fairy tale is an old one, first published in written form by Robert Southey in 1837. Earlier versions of the story feature the bears but the intruder who eats their porridge is an old woman. Goldilocks makes her first appearance in twelve years later, when writer Joseph Cundall changed the old woman into a little girl in his book Treasury of Pleasure Books for Young Children.

In Latin, rana is a frog and Ranunculus means “little frog”, perhaps because many buttercups prefer wetter habitats. (So I suppose the Ranunculaceae is the family of little frogs.)

All in all it’s a good excuse to include a photograph of one of our garden residents:

A little frog. (Common Frog, Rana temporaria.) Photograph by Vanna Bartlett.

Notes

Note 1 – The Fourth Edition of Clive Stace’s “New Flora of the British Isles“ (2019).

Note 2 – It’s all weather dependant but the sequence tends to start with Goldilocks Buttercup, followed by Bulbous (R. bulbosus), then Meadow (R. acris) and finally Creeping Buttercup (R. repens).