SPRING flowers are at last starting to brighten up the land, their bright and vivid colours driving away the drabness of the winter landscape and lifting the hearts of all that see them.

One of the first wildflowers to start to bloom in abundance is the lesser celandine. This glossy sunshine yellow flower can flourish in mass in damp and shady spots throughout the district, transforming these previously drab and dank places into wonderfully uplifting spots well worth a visit. My memories of seeing celandines always transport me back to those first few days of spring, when you first feel that warm welcoming sensation of the sun's rays on your face.

The biology of celandine itself helps with this association, as it is quite the fair weather bloom. When rain threatens, the sunshine yellow petals shut up and all that is then revealed to the world are the greens of the underside of the plant's sepals, making it hard to spot any flowers there at all. Its also closes its flowers once light levels begin to fade, not opening until the worst of the morning chill has been driven away.

Like so many aspects of the natural world, the celandines can lead you into a little mystery to solve. The flowers on this plant first begin to appear in February, with the real mass of blooms opening up in March and April.

Looking at the flower it would appear to be well designed with bright showy petals to attract insect pollinators, it even has nectar sacs fill with sweet nectar to reward insects for visiting. However at the early time of year, when its flowers open, there are very few insect pollinators at large to take advantage of this nectar bounty and to effect pollination. Harsh frosts are still a reality at this time of year and this would be a real threat to any insect that could have evolved to take advantage of the celandine's bounty.

However, there are a few insects like the bumble bees, that have their nest in below ground chambers, which protect them from frosts allowing both the queen and the first drones of the year to take advantage of the celandine's nectar.

There are far too few of these hardier insects to ever attempt to visit and hence pollinate the mass of celandines that we see blooming around our countryside. So the mystery is, how do celandines reproduce if not through the pollination of their flowers like most other brightly coloured flowering plants.

The solution is revealed later in May when a small grain- sized seed like structure appears from the base of the leaves. These structures fall away and lie dormant on the ground until they are washed away by flood water later in the year when they germinate, the following spring into a clone of its parent.

The few flowers that are pollinated form fruits in the normal way and it is these few fruits that are responsible for ensuring the species has genetic variation, essential for the plant evolution and future survival.

This over-production of flowers may seem wasteful and extravagant but celandines have a large geographic range, extending into Africa in the south and Britain in the north. With the more southerly individuals, the timing of their blooms, at this early time of the year, is much better matched to the emergence of insect pollinators when there are few blooms to compete with.