The Dandelion

The Dandelion

Each year at this time when the lawns are greening up, we get that pop of yellow in the landscape.  You may be thinking of daffodils as they are typically the welcome inhabitants of the yards and gardens around us.  Or the hedgerows of forsythia that also bring their golden glow to herald the arrival of spring.  But there are also the dandelions that appear, not only in the woods or on the roadsides, but smack in the middle of some well-kept lawns. 

The dandelion – now labeled as an unwanted visitor to our homesteads is not native to North America.  It is thought to have been brought here by the Pilgrims to be used not only for their value as a food source, but for their medicinal properties as well.  But somewhere along the line, the dandelion has become an unwanted immigrant.  We have, for the most part, turned away from welcoming them for their good qualities and think of them as something that prohibits the achievement of a pristine lawn.  It seems that there are those of us who do this to people too.  Some immigrants are looked down on because they spoil the idea of a perfect landscape.  We pick and chose between things that are often not that different not taking into account their best qualities.  Why is it okay to naturalize those yellow daffodils in the landscape but dislike the already naturalized yellow dandelions?

Within the last few years, some have begun to point out that by leaving the early blooming dandelions around the bees will benefit from them as they are coming out of their hibernation and looking for sources of food.  I’ve seen those messages and also the countermessages that say that it won’t hurt the bees to get rid of them.   We personally leave them in the bigger expanses of the lawn but try to remove them from the flower beds where they will be competition for plants we are trying to keep.  But they are not harming our lawn.  If I were industrious enough, I would take into account the many uses that dandelions have and use them for those qualities.  And there are a lot of them.

If you look on line you can find a lot of ways that dandelions are beneficial.  Aside from a plethora of medicinal uses, the greens are used for salads and contain high amounts of Vitamin A and are low in calories.  They can be used for tea or winemaking and the roots can be used as a substitute for coffee.  In the craft world they are used to make dye.  Their stems can be used for weaving – yes, if they are left unmowed in a field, the stems will reach a foot or more and can be dried and used as a natural weaving material.  (If you leave them in your lawn and continually mow over them you can see how they adapt by making their stems so short or almost non-existent so they will continue to flower.) They can be hammered between papers to make prints of the flower heads, and you can even let children use them as a natural “paint” brush or as a stamp for printing. 

The dandelion is representative of 3 celestial bodies at different stages of their lives.  The yellow flower represents the sun, the white puffball the moon, and the seeds when dispersed represent the stars.  And don’t forget the magic of wishing on those dandelion puffball seeds which, it’s been said, can be airborne for 5 miles. 

A dandelion is an immigrant that puts down a deep taproot and is determined to stay around.  They are amongst the weeds that were welcome when this country was new because of the benefits that they brought.   Whether they’re good for the bees or not, we shouldn’t be so quick to forget about all the other ways that they are beneficial.  Shouldn’t we hope that the Garden of Eden is not a well-manicured lawn, but someplace that embraces the goodness of all the flora and fauna?  Shouldn’t we embrace all the goodness of each other?

L.Mastalski