The Indestructible Dandelion

From May to first frost it is with us. Children delight in it. In the springtime it is pretty, it smells nice, and it's handy for little boys to hold under little girls' chin to see if they've been eating butter. During the summer, it provides hundreds of nifty little parachutes which can be released with just a puff. After that, it just goes sort of blah and the children forget about it.

There are those who argue that the flower makes an excellent wine, that the leaves are good in salads and the dried roots can be brewed to produce a kind of tea.

But to the lawn tender, the wretched dandelion is the greatest scourge of all in every state except a blessed few in the extreme south.

Incredible as it seems, even as late as 1957, the United States imported more than 100,000 pounds of dandelion roots annually for use in pharmaceuticals. What, one may ask, is wrong with the domestic variety? God knows, we've got more than we need.

Its beneficial effects seem to center around problems associated with the intestinal tract and liver, but in the spring it also produces mannitol, a substance used in the treatment of hypertension, and in the production of radio condensers and percussion caps.

But I'm pretty sure that the average gardener would be willing to forego all of the dandelion's helpful and benevolent qualities if it would just go away and leave him alone.

It's pretty difficult to try to relax on your carefully tended lawn when you can glance around and spot several dozen of the ubiquitous weed sprouting up where there weren't any when you sat down ten minutes ago. Then when you get up and try to pull them, you come to the full realization that no tool has ever been invented that can completely extract the taproot, except possibly a backhoe.

That the dandelion adapts so readily to practically any environment is due to the fact that, while the visible portion grows close to the ground where water and carbon dioxide are plentiful, it greedily stuffs the food it produces from these substances into its root, which is really the main part of the plant. Because of this, it does little good for the hapless gardener to remove the tops, no matter how often. The root merely sends up seed scapes again to produce more pretty flowers.

Each golden petal on the dandelion flower is actually another flower in itself, which eventually turns into one of the little parachutes with a seed dangling on the end.

Even though the wind would eventually carry them away without any assistance, I still get the urge to kill when I see the kids gleefully blowing puffballs over our lawn.