Buttercup Flower Meaning: Childhood Charm, Riches, and the Shiniest Petals in the Meadow
Buttercup petals are the shiniest things in the meadow, and scientists finally know why.
A 2011 study from the University of Cambridge found that buttercup petals have a double layer — a smooth yellow top film sitting above a layer of air-filled starch.
That air gap acts like a mirror. Light bounces back out instead of scattering, which is why a buttercup held under the chin throws a yellow glow onto skin.
Generations of British children treated that glow as a test. Shine on your chin meant you liked butter.
The flower's symbolism grew out of exactly that scene — a small, bright, slightly silly joy that belongs to childhood.
But the buttercup has a second life too. Its cultivated cousin, Ranunculus asiaticus, is one of the most requested wedding flowers of the last decade, with petals stacked like tissue paper.
So the buttercup flower meaning splits in two directions: the wild one speaks of innocence and cheerfulness, the garden one of radiant charm and attraction.
Both are worth knowing before you hand someone a bunch.
🌸 Flower Profile
| Scientific Name | Ranunculus spp. — commonly Ranunculus acris (meadow buttercup), Ranunculus repens (creeping buttercup), and Ranunculus asiaticus (Persian buttercup, the florist variety) |
| Family | Ranunculaceae |
| Origin | Wild species are native across temperate Europe, Asia, and North America; Ranunculus asiaticus originates in the eastern Mediterranean, southwest Asia, and northeast Africa |
| Blooming Season | Wild buttercups bloom April through July, peaking in late May and June. Persian buttercups (florist ranunculus) bloom in cool weather — late winter through spring, roughly February to May |
| Primary Meaning | Childhood joy and cheerfulness, with secondary meanings of charm, attractiveness, and — in the older European tradition — riches and humility |
Color Meanings
Table of Contents
1. Yellow
Meaning: Childhood happiness, cheerfulness, and the promise of riches — the original and most loaded buttercup color.
💡 At a Glance
Shade Variations: Lemon yellow — the pale, cool end. Reads as fresh and young, good for new babies and spring celebrations.
Golden yellow — the classic meadow buttercup shade, almost metallic in sunlight. This is the riches-and-sunshine version.
Buttery cream-yellow — common in Persian buttercups. Softer, more romantic, and the shade most used in wedding work because it sits beside ivory without clashing.
Deep amber-gold — found in cultivated ranunculus like the Café series. Carries a warmer, more autumnal mood and pairs with rust and burgundy.
Stems & Styling: Yellow buttercups look thin on their own. Give them volume with contrasting texture rather than more yellow.
Pair with: white anemones for a crisp spring look, blue muscari or forget-me-nots for a cottage-garden feel, or eucalyptus for a cleaner modern bunch.
Stem counts that florists actually use: a loose handful of 9 to 12 for a cheerful gift, 24 or more for a table arrangement with real presence. Buttercup stems are slender, so count generously — a dozen ranunculus occupies roughly the visual space of five roses.
Styling note: cut stems at uneven lengths and let the heads nod at different heights. Buttercups look wrong when forced into a flat dome.
Start with the shine, because nothing else about this flower explains itself without it.
Walk into an English meadow in late May and the buttercups look wet even in dry weather.
That gloss is structural, not pigment.
The Cambridge research team measured it and found the petal reflects light almost like a mirror — far more than any other flower they tested.
Which is how a weed became a childhood instrument.
Hold one under a friend's chin on a sunny day and the skin genuinely turns gold.
No adult taught anyone this.
It passed child to child across generations, which is the most reliable kind of transmission there is.
The butter story is older and wronger.
Dairy farmers across northern Europe assumed buttercup-rich pastures made yellower butter.
In truth cows step around them — the sap is acrid enough to blister a mouth.
The real cause of golden butter is beta-carotene in fresh spring grass, and buttercups simply happen to bloom at the same time.
Correlation turned into a name, and the name turned into a meaning about wealth.
The Victorians were less charmed.
Their flower dictionaries filed the buttercup under childishness, sometimes ingratitude.
Given that a young woman could receive a bouquet and decode it line by line, this mattered.
Sending buttercups was a way of calling someone immature without saying it.
The modern reading is kinder.
Florists and gift guides have quietly dropped the insult and kept the sunshine.
Yellow ranunculus now means warmth, friendship, and uncomplicated good cheer.
I think the honest version sits between the two.
A buttercup is a flower about being young — which is lovely when it is offered, and pointed when it is implied.
Give them to people you want to see smile, not people you want to impress.
2. White
Meaning: Innocence, new beginnings, and quiet sincerity — the bridal face of the buttercup family.
💡 At a Glance
Shade Variations: Pure bright white — clean and modern, used in minimalist bridal work.
Ivory and antique white — faintly warm, often with green centers. Reads softer and photographs better in candlelight.
White with a green eye — the center shows chartreuse before the flower fully opens. Prized in garden-style arrangements for the freshness it adds.
Picotee white — white petals edged in pink or red, a hairline rim. Carries a different meaning altogether: affection held in reserve rather than plain innocence.
Stems & Styling: White ranunculus is the workhorse of the spring wedding bouquet, and it behaves best with a little green.
Pair with: white anemones with black centers for graphic contrast, lily of the valley for scent, or olive and ruscus foliage for structure.
Stem counts: for a hand-tied bridal bouquet, 25 to 35 ranunculus stems gives a full, round shape without filler. For bridesmaids, 12 to 15. For a single buttonhole, one bloom plus a sprig of foliage.
Practical warning: white ranunculus bruises. Brown edges show immediately on white petals. Buy them in tight bud — they open generously over two to three days — and keep them away from fruit bowls, since ethylene gas accelerates the browning.
The white ranunculus is a manufactured flower, and that is the most interesting thing about it.
No wild meadow produces this.
Walk the Yorkshire Dales in June and you will find yellow, yellow, and more yellow.
The white forms came out of deliberate breeding, starting in Ottoman gardens and continuing through French nurseries for four hundred years.What the breeders chased was petal count.
A wild buttercup has five petals.
A good modern ranunculus can carry well over a hundred, stacked in tight whorls like a paper rose that keeps unfolding.
Hold one up to the light and you can see straight through the outer layers.That translucency is why bridal photographers love it.
White roses go flat under a camera flash.
Ranunculus catches light between its layers and keeps depth.
Constance Spry would have understood this instinctively.
She spent the mid-twentieth century dragging British floristry away from stiff symmetry and toward arrangements that looked gathered rather than assembled.
White ranunculus is perfect for that project — formal enough for a chapel, loose enough to look like someone picked it.The symbolism followed the use, not the reverse.
Nobody in 1600 thought white ranunculus meant innocence, because almost nobody had seen one.
It acquired the meaning by appearing in enough wedding bouquets that the association hardened.
That is how most flower meanings actually form.
Use it for beginnings, then — weddings, christenings, new homes, first days.
Just buy it closed, and keep it off the kitchen counter.
3. Pink
Meaning: Admiration, gentle affection, and gratitude — the easiest buttercup color to give without ambiguity.> 💡 At a Glance
Shade Variations: Pale blush — barely-there pink, almost white in daylight. Reads as tender and slightly nostalgic.
Bubblegum and coral pink — cheerful and modern, popular in bright spring arrangements and birthday work.
Dusty antique pink — the muted, slightly brown-toned pink of the Elegance and Cloni series. The most requested wedding shade of the last decade.
Hot magenta-pink — rare in ranunculus but striking. Pushes the meaning toward excitement and celebration rather than gentle affection.
Stems & Styling: Pink ranunculus is forgiving and mixes with almost anything, which makes it a good default gift flower.
Pair with: sweet peas for scent and softness, hellebores for a moodier palette, or tulips for a straightforward spring bunch.
Stem counts: 12 for a thank-you bunch, 18 to 24 for a birthday or Mother's Day arrangement that needs to look generous. Mix two pink shades rather than one — a blush and a dusty rose together look intentional, where a single shade can look flat.
Styling note: pink ranunculus looks best in a low, wide vessel where the heads can lean outward. In a tall narrow vase the slim stems flop and the arrangement looks sparse.
Pink is the color that made ranunculus a business.
Yellow is the wild flower and white is the bridal flower, but pink is the one that sells week after week.
Stand in any florist's cold room in March and the pink buckets are the ones emptying.There is a reason beyond pretty.
Pink is the only flower color in the Western tradition that says warmth with zero risk of misreading.
Red is a declaration.
White is a wedding or a funeral depending on arrangement.
Pink is safe, and safe is useful.
The Victorians understood this precisely.
Their flower dictionaries drew hard lines between red, pink, and white in nearly every species, and pink consistently meant admiration rather than love.
A young man could send pink without compromising anyone.The modern dusty pink is a different animal.
Those muted, tea-stained shades came out of Italian breeding programs — the Cloni and Elegance series, grown mostly in Liguria.
They are not cheerful.
They are moody, faded, slightly melancholy, and they took over wedding photography for most of a decade.
I find that shift revealing.
When couples chose antique pink over bubblegum, they were choosing nostalgia over celebration.
Same flower, opposite mood, entirely a question of which pink.So pick your pink with intent.
Bright coral for a birthday, dusty rose for a wedding, pale blush for an apology.
The flower will carry whichever you give it.
4. Red
Meaning: Passionate charm and devoted attraction — the ranunculus answer to the red rose, without the cliché.> 💡 At a Glance
Shade Variations: Bright scarlet — clean, vivid, celebratory. Reads as energy more than romance.
Deep crimson — the velvet shade. This is the one that functions as a rose substitute for anniversaries and Valentine's work.
Burgundy and near-black red — found in varieties like Ranunculus Hadley and the darker Cloni types. Carries a dramatic, slightly gothic mood, popular in autumn weddings.
Red picotee — cream or white petals edged in red. Suggests love that is partly confessed, which is a surprisingly specific and useful sentiment.
Stems & Styling: Red ranunculus is a genuine alternative to red roses for anyone tired of them, and it costs less per visual impact.
Pair with: chocolate cosmos for scent and depth, dark hellebores, or simply a mass of its own color with no filler. Red ranunculus en masse is striking; red ranunculus scattered through a mixed bunch tends to look accidental.
Stem counts: 12 deep crimson stems delivers the same message as a dozen red roses at a fraction of the predictability. For a dramatic single-color arrangement, 30 or more in a low bowl.
Timing warning: ranunculus is a cool-season flower. Peak availability is February through April, which conveniently covers Valentine's Day — but by June the quality drops sharply and prices rise.
Red ranunculus is what you buy when you mean it but refuse to be predictable.
A dozen red roses is a sentence everyone has already heard.
A dozen deep crimson ranunculus says the same thing in a voice the recipient has not heard before.The form helps.
A ranunculus has far more petals than a rose, packed tighter, and in dark red those layers read as velvet.
Light does not penetrate them.
It sits on the surface and makes the bloom look heavier than it is.
The wild version of this grows in places most flower shoppers never picture.
Go to Crete or the Galilee in late March and the hillsides turn scarlet — ranunculus, anemone, and poppy together, a few weeks of saturation before the summer burns it off.Those fields are where the old blood myths come from.
Adonis bleeding into the ground, Aphrodite weeping, the flowers coming up red the next spring.
The story officially belongs to the anemone.
But it grew in the same soil as the ranunculus, and in symbolic terms neighbors borrow from each other.Practically, there is one thing to know.
Ranunculus hates heat.
It is a cool-season flower, best from February to April, which means red ranunculus peaks precisely at Valentine's Day and fades by early summer.
So if you want to make this gesture, make it in late winter.
That is when the flower is at its best and the gesture at its cheapest — which is a rare alignment worth using.
5. Orange
Meaning: Enthusiasm, warmth, and confident energy — the color for congratulations rather than courtship.> 💡 At a Glance
Shade Variations: Clear tangerine — bright and uncomplicated. The congratulations shade.
Coral-orange — warmer and pinker, bridging into romantic territory. A common wedding choice in tropical and summer palettes.
Terracotta and rust — the muted orange of the Café Caramel and similar series. Earthy, autumnal, and heavily used in modern desert-palette weddings.
Orange with yellow reverse — petals that shade from orange to gold depending on angle. Reads as movement and energy, excellent in bright mixed bunches.
Stems & Styling: Orange ranunculus is the most underused color in the family and the best value for a bold statement.
Pair with: deep blue or purple anemones for high contrast, or with rust-toned foliage and dried grasses for the earthy look. Avoid pairing orange ranunculus with pale pink — the combination tends to look muddy rather than considered.
Stem counts: 15 to 20 for a congratulations or new-job bouquet with real presence. Orange needs mass to work; a few stems scattered in a mixed bunch read as filler.
Styling note: orange ranunculus photographs hot. In a room with warm lighting it can dominate everything else, so build the rest of the arrangement in cooler or neutral tones.
Orange is the buttercup color nobody asks for, and that is exactly why it works.
Walk into a florist and ask for ranunculus and you will be offered blush, white, and maybe red.
Orange sits in the back bucket.It should not.
Tangerine ranunculus is one of the most physically cheerful objects you can hand a person.
It does not negotiate.
It does not hint at anything.
It arrives and announces good news.
Which makes it the correct flower for a job offer, a promotion, a passed exam, a new business.
Those moments call for energy rather than tenderness, and most gift bouquets get this wrong by defaulting to pink.The muted end of orange has had a louder decade.
Terracotta, rust, caramel — the Café series varieties — arrived just as wedding design got tired of blush and greenery.
Suddenly every outdoor wedding in California and Australia was built on dried grasses, rust ranunculus, and pampas.That trend will fade and the clear brights will come back, because they always do.
The florist trade runs on a pendulum between saturated and muted, roughly a decade each way.
Mid-century arrangements were loud, the 2010s were pale, the 2020s went earthy.
My advice is to ignore the pendulum.
Buy orange ranunculus when someone has achieved something.
It is the only flower in the buttercup family that sounds like applause.
6. Purple
Meaning: Dignity, admiration for achievement, and a touch of mystery — the most formal face of the buttercup.> 💡 At a Glance
Shade Variations: Soft lavender — gentle and slightly nostalgic. Works for sympathy and for quiet congratulations.
Deep violet — rich and formal. The dignity shade, best for achievement and recognition.
Plum and aubergine — the darkest purples, close to burgundy. Dramatic and popular in autumn and winter event design.
Purple picotee and bicolor — white or cream petals rimmed in violet, found in varieties bred for novelty. Suggests complexity and layered feeling rather than a single clean sentiment.
Stems & Styling: Purple ranunculus needs careful company or it reads as somber.
Pair with: white ranunculus or anemones to lift it, silver-grey foliage like dusty miller for a cooler palette, or soft yellow for a deliberate complementary contrast that stays cheerful.
Stem counts: 12 deep violet stems for a retirement or achievement gift. For sympathy work, keep purple to a third of the arrangement and build the rest in white — all-purple sympathy flowers can feel heavy.
Practical note: purple ranunculus fades faster in direct sun than yellow or white does. Keep the vase out of a south-facing window if you want the color to hold its depth for the full week.
Purple is the only flower color with a legal history.
In Rome, Tyrian purple was restricted by statute.
Wearing it without rank was a punishable offense, because the dye cost more by weight than gold and the state intended to keep it that way.Three thousand murex snails for a few grams of dye will do that to a color.
Every purple flower since has inherited the association without earning it.
So a purple ranunculus comes pre-loaded with dignity.
It is the wrong flower for flirting and the right flower for respect.
The Victorians split it finer than we do.
Purple was the color of half-mourning — the stage after black and grey, when a widow was permitted to return partway to the living world.A purple bouquet in 1870 could mean grief handled with composure.
We have mostly lost that reading, which is a shame, because it was useful.
There is no modern flower for sorrow that has been survived.
What survives is the achievement meaning.
Look at any Western graduation and the hoods are purple-trimmed for law, for divinity, for doctoral rank.Purple means you earned something.
Which makes purple ranunculus the correct choice for a retirement, a doctorate, a thirty-year career closing out.
Just lift it with white, and keep it out of the sun.
Deep violet is the first ranunculus color to go pale, and a faded purple reads as tired rather than dignified.
7. Bicolor and Picotee
Meaning: Complicated feeling, duality, and affection with a condition attached — the most expressive buttercups of all.> 💡 At a Glance
Shade Variations: White with pink rim — the classic picotee. Reads as tenderness held carefully in check.
Cream with red edge — bolder and more dramatic. Suggests love declared with hesitation.
Yellow with orange flush — warm and sunny, the most cheerful bicolor. Good for friendship and congratulations.
Striped and flamed forms — petals streaked rather than edged, echoing the broken tulips. Carries a sense of complexity, contradiction, and interest.
Café and antique bicolors — muted brown-pink and peach combinations that shift color as the bloom ages. The same stem can read differently on day one and day five.
Stems & Styling: Bicolor ranunculus is the one color family that works best sparingly.
Pair with: solid-colored blooms picked up from one of the bicolor's two tones. A white-and-pink picotee beside plain blush ranunculus looks deliberate; beside yellow it looks confused.
Stem counts: 5 to 7 picotee stems as the focal point of an otherwise plain arrangement. A full bouquet of bicolors fights itself — the eye cannot settle.
Buying tip: picotee quality varies enormously. Inspect the rim before you buy. A clean, even edge is what you are paying for, and a blurred one is a reject stem that found its way into the bucket.
The most expensive flower in European history was a sick one.
During the Dutch tulip mania of the 1630s, the bulbs that commanded house prices were the broken ones — petals flamed with contrasting color, each pattern unrepeatable.The cause was a mosaic virus.
Collectors were paying fortunes for a disease, and nobody would know that for another three centuries.
Ranunculus breeders wanted the same look without the infection, and they got it.
Picotee forms — pale petal, crisp contrasting rim — were competition flowers in the florists' societies of northern England, where mill workers and weavers bred show blooms with the seriousness other men gave to pigeons.Those clubs set the standard that still applies.
The rim must be even.
It must be unbroken.
A smudge disqualifies the stem, which is why picotee ranunculus is priced above plain and why you should look closely before buying.
Symbolically, a two-colored flower says something a single color cannot.White means innocence, pink means affection, and a white petal rimmed in pink means both at once, in tension.
I have always read picotee as the flower of a complicated yes.
Feeling that is real but has an edge on it.
If you need to say something that does not fit a single color, this is the buttercup to send.
Five stems, plainly arranged, and let the recipient look closely.
Gift Guide by Occasion
1. New baby or christening
This is the buttercup's strongest occasion, since the flower's core meaning is childhood joy. Send a mixed bunch of pale yellow and white ranunculus, 15 to 18 stems, in a short wide vase the parents do not have to find. Skip glass tubes and cellophane — new parents have no free hands. Add a card naming the childhood-joy meaning explicitly, because almost nobody knows it and it turns a nice bouquet into a thoughtful one.
2. Valentine's Day or anniversary
Buy deep crimson ranunculus instead of red roses. February is peak ranunculus season, so quality is high and price is low, and a dozen crimson stems reads as a considered choice rather than a panic purchase at a petrol station. Order three to four days ahead and buy them in tight bud — they open over two or three days, which means they peak on the day rather than before it. One warning: do not mix them with red roses. The ranunculus loses, every time.
3. Congratulations — new job, promotion, exam results
Go orange, 15 to 20 stems of clear tangerine, with no pink anywhere in the arrangement. Orange ranunculus is the closest thing in flowers to applause, and it photographs well on a desk, which matters if the recipient is going to post it. Pair with deep blue anemones if you want contrast, or send it single-color for a cleaner statement. Avoid lilies for a workplace delivery — the pollen stains shirts and the scent overwhelms an open-plan office.### 4. Wedding bouquet and ceremony flowers
Ranunculus is a genuine peony alternative at roughly half the cost, and it is in season for spring weddings when peonies are unreliable. For a bridal bouquet, budget 25 to 35 stems for a full hand-tied shape. Dusty pink and white is the safe palette; terracotta and rust reads more current. Tell your florist to source in bud and condition them cold for 48 hours. The structural warning matters here: ranunculus stems are hollow and snap under tight wiring, so a skilled florist will hand-tie rather than wire them.
5. Sympathy and funeral
Use white and soft lavender ranunculus, and keep purple to roughly a third of the arrangement so it does not turn heavy. Ranunculus suits sympathy work better than many flowers because it is gentle and unscented — important in a small room or a care home where lily scent becomes oppressive. For the loss of a child or a young person, the childhood-joy meaning makes pale yellow genuinely appropriate rather than jarring, though check that the family would welcome color before sending it.
6. Mother's Day
Mix two pink shades — blush and dusty rose — rather than one, 18 to 24 stems. A single pink shade looks flat, while two reads as intentional. Ranunculus is a good Mother's Day choice in the UK, where the holiday falls in March at peak season; in the US, where it falls in May, order early and expect higher prices as the season closes. Add sweet peas if you can get them. They supply the scent ranunculus lacks, and the two bloom at the same time.
7. Apology or making amends
Pale blush ranunculus, 12 stems, plainly wrapped. The logic is restraint — an apology bouquet should not look expensive or triumphant, because that shifts the attention to the gesture rather than the fault. Avoid red, which overclaims, and avoid yellow, because the Victorian childishness reading is exactly the wrong note when you are trying to be taken seriously. Write the note by hand and keep it shorter than the bouquet.
The buttercup's most persistent story is the one about the prince in gold and green. A Persian tale, retold through European flower books for centuries, describes a young prince who loved one of the meadow nymphs and sang to her nightly without ever confessing. He died of it. The gods, finding this either touching or pathetic, turned him into a small gold-and-green flower that still stands in the grass where he sang. It is a story about devotion that never becomes a sentence, and it explains why the buttercup reads as shy rather than bold.
Greek and Roman tradition handled the flower more practically. The name Ranunculus means little frog, after the plants' fondness for wet ground, and classical writers were far more interested in the buttercup's toxicity than its romance. Pliny the Elder recorded its acrid, blistering sap, and the plant family it belongs to — Ranunculaceae — includes aconite and hellebore, which is to say some of the most lethal plants in the European flora. Beggars in several European traditions were said to deliberately blister their skin with buttercup sap to attract sympathy, a practice that gave the plant the grim folk name of beggar's buttons in places.
Victorian floriography took the buttercup in a third direction entirely. The flower dictionaries that circulated from the 1840s onward — Kate Greenaway's 1884 Language of Flowers being the best known — filed it under childishness and ingratitude. In a culture where a bouquet could be read sentence by sentence, this made the buttercup a loaded gift. Meanwhile British children, entirely outside adult supervision, were conducting the butter test in meadows and passing it down the generations. Folklorists Iona and Peter Opie, who spent decades recording the unsupervised games and rhymes of British children, catalogued buttercup rituals among the seasonal play that children taught each other without any adult input. The children's meaning won. Nobody today sends buttercups to accuse someone of ingratitude, but plenty of people still remember the yellow glow under their chin.
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Buy them closed. Ranunculus opens dramatically over two to three days. A bunch that looks perfect in the shop is already past its best, and a bunch of tight buds will give you a full week.
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Cut stems at an angle and change the water daily. Ranunculus stems are hollow and foul water quickly, which is the single most common reason a bunch dies early. Daily fresh water genuinely doubles the vase life.
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Handle the stems gently. They are hollow and snap easily, especially near the head. Never grip a ranunculus by the stem just below the bloom.
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Keep them cool and out of direct sun. Ranunculus is a cool-season flower and wilts fast above about 21°C / 70°F. A spot away from radiators and south-facing windows adds days.
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Keep them away from fruit. Ripening fruit releases ethylene gas, which makes ranunculus petals brown at the edges within hours. The kitchen fruit bowl is the worst place in the house for them.
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Strip the lower leaves but not all of them. Remove anything that would sit below the waterline, since submerged foliage rots and clouds the water. Leave the upper leaves — they are part of the look.
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Wash your hands after arranging wild buttercups. The sap of wild Ranunculus species is genuinely irritating and can blister sensitive skin. Cultivated Persian ranunculus is far milder but still worth not rubbing into your eyes.
📌 Quick Summary
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Yellow — Childhood happiness, cheerfulness, and the promise of riches — the original and most loaded buttercup color.
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White — Innocence, new beginnings, and quiet sincerity — the bridal face of the buttercup family.
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Pink — Admiration, gentle affection, and gratitude — the easiest buttercup color to give without ambiguity.
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Red — Passionate charm and devoted attraction — the ranunculus answer to the red rose, without the cliché.
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Orange — Enthusiasm, warmth, and confident energy — the color for congratulations rather than courtship.
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Purple — Dignity, admiration for achievement, and a touch of mystery — the most formal face of the buttercup.
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Bicolor and Picotee — Complicated feeling, duality, and affection with a condition attached — the most expressive buttercups of all.
More Flower Meanings
The thing I keep coming back to is that the buttercup's meaning was settled by children, not by adults.
The Victorians, with their dictionaries and their elaborate codes, declared it the flower of childishness and ingratitude. They were the authorities. They lost.
What survived is the game — hold it under a chin, watch the gold appear, declare a verdict on butter. A trick of petal physics that no adult invented and no adult could kill.
That is unusual. Most flower meanings were handed down from above, printed in gift books and absorbed by people trying not to make social mistakes. The buttercup's meaning was handed sideways, child to child, in meadows, for centuries.
So when you give someone buttercups — wild yellow ones or the ruffled Persian kind — you are not quoting a dictionary. You are quoting a field in late May and somebody's cousin insisting it worked.
That seems like the better authority.
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