These little flowers make me want to break out in rowdy song.

The originator of the raucous tune swimming around in my head was the band The Foundations, who found their inspiration in its diminutive yellow blooms. I know that you can’t help but sing loud; you know the words!

“Why do you build me up (Build me up)

Buttercup baby just to

let me down (Let me down)

And mess me around

And then worst of all (Worst of all)

You never call baby

When you say you will (Say you will)

But I love you still

I need you (I need you)

More than anyone darlin’

You know that I have from the start

So build me up (Build me up)

Buttercup

Don’t break my heart.

The real buttercups can also break your heart, but do offer some affection, besides their giving a potentially fatal affliction.

Shakespeare was affected by buttercups, too, and noted in Love’s Labour’s Lost, the “Cuckoo-buds of yellow hue do paint the meadows with delight.” Find these lyrical flowers in fields, roadsides, on trails and in waste places showcasing their rich golden color.

Look, but don’t touch, since buttercups can cause dermatitis in humans. Nor should you take a bite, since this plant contains a compound that not only offers an acrid taste, but can blister a mouth and poison thebody. In A History of the Vegetable Drugs of the Pharmacopeia of the United States, John U. Lloyd wrote, “In the olden time the different acrid species of Ranunculus were used rather freely in medicine. As the practice of medicine inclined toward a human system, physicians gradually substituted less virulent remedies.”

However, as often is the case, learned men will disagree. John Bartram noted that one could cure inveterate syphilis by making a buttercup decoction. Perhaps he thought death was an appropriate cure for this persistent disease.

It isn’t only humans who are susceptible to the buttercup’s curious curse. Livestock should be on the lookout: cows, goats, horses and other farm animals can be poisonedtoo. Ingesting buttercups will make a cow’s milk unpalatable. Even so, farmers were known to rub buttercup flowers on cows’ udders and hang these flowers over their barn doors to make the cows’ milk richer with golden cream.

Buttercups are in the genus Ranunculus, named for the “small frog” that perhaps shares its affection for low, wet places. Thoreau also observed the water connection when he noted that the plant has a “strong freshwater marsh smell, rather agreeable sometimes as a bottle of salts, like the salt marsh and seaweeds, invigorating to my imagination.”

In the Pacific Northwest, buttercups are called “coyote’s eyes,” since legend has it that long ago a playful coyote was tossing his eyes up in the air when an eagle came down and snatched them. In a clever move, the coyote made new eyes from the buttercupflowers. Other names for buttercups included crow’s foot, gold cup, meadow bloom, yellow weed, frogwort and blisterplant, among others.

No matter what you call them, be sure to have a Buttercup Day, as in A.A. Milne’s poem of the same name:

Where is Anne?

Head above the buttercups,

Walking by the stream,

Down among the buttercups.

Where is Anne?

Walking with her man,

Lost in a dream,

Lost among the buttercups.

What has she got in that little brown head?

Wonderful thoughts which can never be said.

What has she got in that firm little fist of hers?

Somebody’s thumb, and it feels like Christopher’s.

Where is Anne?

Close to her man.

Brown head, gold head,

In and out the buttercups.

Suzan Bellincampi is director of the Felix Neck Wildlife Sanctuary in Edgartown.