The much maligned dandelion
"the first time we lose our innocence is when we are told that dandelions are not flowers, but weeds, and that they are not to be loved, but destroyed."
I was travelling in the car today and as I paused at some traffic lights I noticed a little clump, well quite a large clump of dandelions, mixed in with grass. They looked beautiful and once again I started to reflect on why we are so down on weeds in general, but the dandelion in particular. I couldn't photograph the ones that inspired this post, but on my way home I kept my eye out and photographed a few near home.
It's not a really good photo but hopefully you can imagine what a whole field would look like. The photograph above shows what a truly beautiful flower it is when you look at it closely - and the puffy seed heads are romantic and ethereal. But they are extremely tough plants and hard to get rid of, and not native and so we do our best to eradicate them. I gather it is one of the first flowers to bloom in the northern hemisphere summer and the last to die in the autumn. And so the bees absolutely adore them, and surely we should be doing everything we can to encourage bees, threatened as they are. I know they are not native, are intruders here in Australia, but over there on the other side of the world they are native - and yet still considered a weed.
I also wondered as I got home, what makes the dandelion less desirable than the indigenous everlasting daisies that I have planted at home. Which are also very pretty.
But I don't think you can do as much with them as you can with the dandelion!
The easiest thing you can do is eat the leaves. They have a slightly bitter taste and can be added to salads - or you can stir fry them with garlic, lemon and olive oil. Basically you can do with dandelion leaves more or less anything you do with any green leafy vegetable. You can also make dandelion tea from the leaves, (and maybe even the roots).
The roots can be dried, roasted and ground and made into a sort of coffee substitute which is said to be quite tasty, but I guess that's a lot of bother for something you don't necessarily enjoy all that much, although a couple of sites seemed to think it was worth the effort. Only if you've got nothing else to do I would think.
And finally the flowers can be made into dandelion wine. And obviously in some parts of the world it is sold commercially, as these beautiful looking bottles attest.
The name dandelion is from the old French - dent- de-lion (lion's tooth) - which is supposed to be related to the jagged nature of the leaves. Although I did see somebody link it to the tenacity of the long tap root. It is also known as piss in the bed or pisse-en-lit, because it is also a well-known diuretic. And I forgot to mention that it is packed with vitamins and minerals and things and is used in all sorts of herbal medicines.
Then let's not forget that it has all sorts of mythical and magical properties. And if you surf the net you can find all of them. I'll stick to the blowing of the seeds from the puffball head. You can make a wish as you blow - if you blow all the seeds away your wish will be granted. You can do the 'he loves me, he loves me not' or 'this year, next year ...' thing, and you can apparently tell the time by blowing the seeds - which is why it's called a 'dandelion clock'. The number of puffs you need to blow away all the seeds will tell you the time. Obviously nonsense, but sort of lovely.
"The Piglet was sitting on the ground at the door of his house blowing happily at a dandelion, and wondering whether it would be this year, next year, sometime, or never. He had just discovered that it would be never, and was trying to remember what 'it' was, and hoping it wasn't anything nice, when Pooh came up." AA Milne
In his lovely book The Te of Piglet, Benjamin Hoff has this to say - I think associated with the above picture:
“Thousands of years ago, man lived in harmony with the rest of the natural world. Through what we would today call Telepathy, he communicated with animals, plants, and other forms of life-none of which he considered “beneath” himself, only different, with different jobs to perform. He worked side by side with earth angels and nature spirits, with whom he shared responsibility for taking care of the world.”
I should just mention as well though that the flowers are thought to be lucky in a wedding bouquet, and the plant symbolises hope, summer and childhood. I mean - just look at Piglet.
For above all it is extremely beautiful and many great artists have chosen it as a subject. Interestingly if you just feed in dandelions painting, you get a whole lot of pictures of the seed head rather than the flower. These are some that I found (left to right, top to bottom - Van Gogh, Sophie Lavale, Millet, Monet):
So as an article in The Guardian said - don't mow all the dandelions down and sit back and enjoy the bees and pollen beetles and the beauty of the flowers.
