Dandelion

Taraxacum officinale

Sphere of Seeds

I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with dandelions. A part of me really loves their yellow flower heads and fluffy spherical seed heads. And then another part of me has adopted our north american hatred for them in my lawn. For some reason, even though I think the yellow flowers are beautiful, especially up close, I still get irritated when the mower doesn't manage to cut them down.

Dandelions haven't always been a weed. They were once cultivated by apothecaries for their medicinal uses, their roots and leaves were commonly sold in French markets and the Japanese even had a National Dandelion Society with more than 200 varieties of the flower in pure white, copper, orange and deep black. You can make wine from dandelion flowers as the Celts once did and the flower heads help fruit ripen in orchards by emitting ethylene gas at sunset. Pilgrims and pioneers carefully carried its seeds over from the old world and the flower then quickly spread across North America. It reached the west coast in the 19th century and then suddenly became a weed. Now it gets poisoned, dug up and bad mouthed. We humans seem to have a funny relationship with plants that do as well as we do.