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?
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