Country diary: This vegetable garden intruder is easy on the eye, hard on the back

Crook, County Durham: It's not just the creeping buttercup that demands attention from me and my spadeThis will hurt tomorrow morning, warns my ageing back. But it's a year since the vegetable patch was dug and it has to be done: creeping buttercup has run riot. Ranunculus repens is a surreptitious invader whose stolons creep over the soil, sinking deep roots from their tips and sprouting new plants that repeat the performance. Give one plant an inch and its clonal progeny will take a square yard.The buttercups are consigned to the compost bin. Leaning on the garden fork, watching a blackbird pounce on uncovered worms, I can see another weed that I missed: lesser celandine (Ficaria verna), a close relative of buttercup. Its rosette of marbled, spoon-shaped leaves has unfurled and lies flat against the soil, intercepting every available photon of weak February sunshine. Continue reading...