Occasional paper: St. Anthony’s Turnip

Mostly I leave Sunday photography to our colleague, the estimable Chris Bertram. Still, this Sunday I was walking the dog in the hills above my town. (“My town” being a modest community of a couple of thousand people in the rolling countryside of northern Bavaria.)[copyright me, yesterday]And by the side of a grassy meadow, I stopped to photograph this pretty little yellow flower: [they look so innocent]A moment with the app revealed that this was Ranuncula bulbus, the Bulbous Buttercup. There are a bunch of species in the genus Ranuncula, which is another way of saying there are a lot of different kinds of buttercup. That’s because buttercups appear to be a recent evolutionary radiation, and a pretty successful one.But when I did a quick search on these little guys? I found they used to have another name. The Bulbous Buttercup was once known as Saint Anthony’s Turnip.Saint… what? Let’s start with the “Bulbous” part. The Bulbous Buttercup is so called because it has a bulb.…