Ranunculus asiaticus
Before hot season annuals are planted in temperate climates, spring annuals like pansies can be planted. Withstanding and flowering at cool temperatures, these plants flourish until the weather heats up, putting out new blooms, responding to deadheading. They have longer flowering times than spring bulbs. Some years seem more popular for pansies than others, and maybe the temperatures in each particular spring play a role. Pansies come in cheerful array of familiar colors, like purple, yellow, and white, and also other colors like maroon, and orange. Their flattish flower faces are a familiar and comforting sight in spring. Less familiar than a pansy, and in a collectively different palette of colors, but useful the same way, is Ranunculus asiatica.
Ranunculus asiatica varieties often have a rounded flower, full of many petals. Also thriving in cool weather, these plants can be planted where pansies might be used. So pronounced, and sometimes in such vibrant colors, one could imagine them outside in perhaps a busy cafe’s planters, if not as much considered domestically perhaps.
Many people have heard of buttercups, and could maybe recognize a yellow buttercup flower, but might not know that Ranunculus asiatica is a buttercup as well. With about 400 species of buttercups, these extra showy ones have sometimes seemingly extra saturated color. Colors can be seen sometimes in vibrant magenta, orange, yellow, and pink.
Would these colors clash with the color of pansies, if these similarly timed blooming flowers were planted in unison? Pansies seem maybe comprised of subdued and hopeful colors, R. asiatica often vivacious and celebratory. Yet, even though these palettes seem to differ, both plants actually come in a vast array of colors, so they might be able to be matched together creatively. R. asiaticus can include pastels, if its magenta cousin is too vibrant to juxtapose with a soft indigo pansy (but why not?), and R. asiaticus also includes bicolored flowers, and pansies can also be bicolored. Both flowers have white varieties. There could be endless creative matches, especially if God has made no clashing plant colors in his palette.
Sources:
The New York Botanical Garden Illustrated Encyclopedia of Horticulture, 1981