A Plant that Lost Its Social Status

When I was a child, there were two things my mother was most likely to comment upon when she looked out the window into our backyard.  One was when she spotted a cardinal, a hopeful sign that cardinals might be nesting nearby.  The second thing she would frequently comment upon was when she noticed a new bright dandelion flower that seemed to have suddenly appeared in the grass.  The cardinals would never allow me to approach and look at them close up.  But the dandelion flowers would.

My sister, the neighborhood kids, and I would take greater delight in the puffball that would later appear from such a flower.  The ball seemed like a toy (of a kind that no human could have ever constructed).  We were fascinated by its perfectly spherical shape made of delicate hairs so lightly attached that we could blow them off the stem.  As we watched the hairs with their tiny seeds float away, seemingly carefree in the breeze, we children had no concern at all that we might have been increasing the labor of some adults trying to weed their lawns.

The dandelion flower's ability to release to the lightest breeze its feathered seeds (as many as 50 per flower) is part of the larger story of how the dandelion has spread across the planet Earth.  The other key to understanding dandelion history is realizing that for most of its history the dandelion was not considered to be a weed. Instead, it was thought to be one of the most important and versatile gifts that Nature provided to humankind.

Going back just a little over a century, we can get one clue to the dandelion's usefulness in an 1888 U.S. Formulary of medicine.  A full 12 of the 435 prescriptions listed included an ingredient from the dandelion plant.  Although the dandelion-human connection had begun centuries earlier in Europe, by 1800 the plant had reached the Pacific coast of the U.S.  The plant had been carried westward by European pioneers and by winds propelling its puffball's seeds.  (It would eventually get to Japan.)

Over the past few decades, many writers on spirituality have been excited to discover the rich tradition of prayers and thought of the Celtic Christians.  Researchers have also found in Celtic history many references to dandelions, an indication of the roles the plant played in culture throughout Europe.  Its primary uses were as a diuretic and as a vegetable.  Because of its deeply-notched leaves, the plant (which had an ancestry of many millions of years behind it) was honored with the name "dandelion" from the Old French words for "lion's teeth."

detail of painting
by Richard Mauch, 1921

The dandelion's involvement with human society is demonstrated in its being mentioned in literature as diverse as that of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Thoreau, George Eliot, and Beatrix Potter. By the 20th century, however, medicines and diets had changed, and dandelion greens came to be eaten mostly by the poor who had to stretch their food budget with a free, found vegetable. In the U.S. and some other countries, the dandelion has now mostly returned to its former life as a vagabond, blown about by the wind.

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Do you have any memories about dandelions?

(The photograph of the yellow flower is by Arcanewizard

and is used under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.)