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New Jersey Gardening

lesser celandine

18 years ago

I have a very invasive plant which is threating to over grow

my whole property called lesser celandine. It has a pretty flower that is, a pretty yellow like buttercup but is larger. It is growing in my lawn, flower beds and in my cold frames! It grows on rhizomes.

I am desperate to get rid of it forever. I have used Roundup, Rotilled it, pulled it up by hand - all to no avail!

Help!!!!!

John

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Comments (3)

steve_nj
18 years ago
Now is the time to use Roundup or carefully dig the plants by hand. Don't rototill or you'll spread the little tubers all over! It can be gotten rid of (with persistence).
miss_rumphius_rules
18 years ago
The small tubers/bulbettes of this very invasive plant are easily spread by rototilling, digging, transplanting and even dividing other plants where the tubers are growing side by side. March is the time to attack--I've been trying to control this plant on two separate properties (mine) over 15 years. It can be greatly reduced and in some cases eliminated through persisitance. I carefully hand pull the enemy from my garden beds. I will admit to doing little with it in the lawn--if you could call my spring melange of ajuga, lesser celandine, naturalized bulbs a lawn.

Lesser celandine is emphemeral and disappears in the heat at the end of May, so if you are going to continue to try and eradicate it, you have to mark where it is now...
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I quite like the lesser celandine, although I grew the fancy leaved forms (which would often revert to the straight green species). They would often take over my woodland shade area in spring then disappear. They never seemed to overwhelm anything - certainly not my hellebores - and were relatively easy to remove where not wanted. Wish I could say the same for their cousin, the creeping buttercup, Ranunculus repens......now THAT one's the pernicious weed in my garden!! I get the impression that the hellebores may be relatively new - once they become well-established clumps with some size to them, I doubt you will need to worry about the celandine overwhelming them, just as flora indicates :-)
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Lesser celandine is the bane of my existence. The first two springs after I planted my native garden I tried to pull it by hand, but every year it seemed to get worse. This year, there are carpets of it, wrapped around the bases of the other plants, smothering others out of existence (a wild geranium and two Hypoxis hirsuta have vanished beneath the Ranunculus - it's like a 1950s sci-fi movie!) This year I got over my toxic chemical qualms and bought some Round-Up, but it didn't seem to do much good, and I couldn't spray in and around the other plants, which meant I couldn't spray most of the lesser celandine. Is there any chance that, if I leave it alone, the lack of soil disturbance will tame it? I'm guessing no. With the lesser celandine, star of bethlehem, burdock, dandelion and other weeds, my native gardening experience is often not an enjoyable one. -- wd
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And as to herbicides, that's not a completely horrible option. The celandine stays green well after other things have gone dormant, so you can spot it and not wipe out neighboring plants. On the other hand, you're about a month late (in my area) for it to be really effective, unless you get a stretch of warm weather.
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Ah..a quandary...move vertially upwards 800 feet to get rid of the celandine, or grow an olive tree on my patio...decisions, decisions... :) Been out today pulling up handfulls of the little blighter - trying to get as many of the little tubers as possible. Remind me next year to pick up all my berberis cuttings...those thorns are *sharp*! I've yanked out lots of my crocosmia, decapitated several garlic plants and completely obliterated my campanula because the calandine was completely entangled with them :( My lawn now has big patches of dead grass from the glyphosate, and in the middle of each patch is a hole where I've dug the the celandine out! I'll never play croquet on the lawn!! I've filled a black bin liner with celandine though!! I think you're right Shrubs, I should have done this in February when it first shows its head :( Alcina
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nclemmons
18 years ago
I also have it and have been working to remove it for the past four years. In the beds I have carefully applied roundup and it's just about gone. In grass, I took a 1" piece of copper pipe and made a tool that looks like a soil probe and has a ground opening on the edge of the pipe. I have a cross handle drilled in the pipe made from a 1/2 inch dowel. I push the pipe over the plants in to a depth of a couple of inches and remove a plug that captures the tubers. I've done this the past two years and I can see progress, though it takes persistence.

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