Dandelion

Overview

Dandelion is the most aggressively persecuted plant in the domestic garden and one of the most comprehensively useful plants in the temperate world. Every part of it is edible. The roots, roasted and ground, make a passable coffee substitute that has been used seriously in wartime and pleasurably ever since. The leaves are one of the most nutritionally dense wild greens available — higher in vitamins A, C, and K, and in iron, calcium, and potassium, than most cultivated salad leaves. The flowers are made into wine, into fritters, into syrup. The root is one of the best-evidenced liver herbs in European tradition. It has been used in Chinese, Arab, and European medicine for at least a thousand years, and it appears in the very first printed herbals. The golden flower that turns to a clock of seeds is the first food of early bees and the last of late ones. It is, by almost any measure of usefulness, the most important plant in a lawn.

Botanical Notes

A rosette-forming perennial with a deep taproot that regenerates from any fragment, deeply lobed and toothed leaves (the lobes pointing back toward the base, like lion's teeth — dent de lion, the French name that became dandelion), hollow flowering stems bearing solitary, bright golden composite flower heads from March to November, and spherical seed heads of plumed achenes dispersed by wind. Common throughout the northern hemisphere in grassland, lawns, roadsides, and any disturbed soil. The white latex in the stems and leaves contains taraxacin and taraxacerin; the roots contain taraxacum, inulin, and bitter sesquiterpene lactones responsible for liver and digestive activity.

Lore & History

The dandelion clock — blowing the seed head and counting the puffs to tell the hour — is one of the oldest and most universal children's games in northern Europe, documented in records from the fourteenth century onward. In some traditions, blowing the seeds carried wishes or messages to those you loved. In folk medicine, dandelion was a plant of the sun and of Jupiter — governing the liver and urinary system in the humoral system that structured European medicine until the eighteenth century — and its consistent use for these organs across traditions without contact suggests it was genuinely observed to have effect. The specific epithet officinale marks its place in the apothecary's record. Its proscription from lawns is one of the more peculiar aesthetic choices of the twentieth century.

Warnings