MOMENTS IN POT CULTURE: THE BUTTERCUP

Words by Jessica Peace

‘...the sky is summer-blue, /And meadows full of buttercups, /Are spread abroad for you’ whispered Cicely Mary Barker’s blonde, bobbed, Buttercup fairy as she pranced in postcards and children’s books in between the flapping of the roaring twenties.

‘Why do you build me up buttercup, baby… Just to let me down and mess me around?’ The foundations 1969 hit is STILL a hit on the dance floor at Blighty weddings.

A year after Michael Landy destroyed all his possessions in the infamous Breakdown, in 2002 he walked the streets of London and collected weeds that had burst through the concrete. Landy yanked a few out to tend to and study for his series Nourishment, from this comes the delicate etching, ‘Creeping Buttercup’.