What's a dandelion gotta do?
For nearly all the thirty+ years of our marriage, Diane and I have maintained some sort of garden. I admit up front that she's mostly been the brains of the operation and I've mostly supplied what little braun I can muster. Over the decades, there have been any number of gardening magazines and catalogs littering the furniture (and bathrooms). I can see her paging through them, committing the latin genus and species to memory while I struggle to remember even the pop-culture pseudonyms. And in said gardens, whether in Wisconsin at our first home or at our current "slipping down the hill" Athens location, we have always played this musical chairs game of planting and replanting said flowers, shrubs, and miscellaneous flora. We plant this purple thing here. The next year it needs to move because it's crowding out the small, leafy red things. We put in a row of these floppy silver lambs ear things there and before you know it they're crawling over the brick barrier and they're out of here. On and on, year after year, we play the role of community planner, trying to bring together a group of plants that share common sun and soil requirements while being able to peacefully live and let live.
Of course, a fundamental component of plant musical chairs is weeding. And here, I readily admit that Diane has done the brunt of the yanking. The reasons are three-fold. First and foremost, I hate to weed. Hate it! Hate it! Hate it! There's nothing more I can really say to hammer that point home. As Jack Nicholson pointedly explained to Helen Hunt in As Good As It Gets, "I'm using the word hate here to describe how I feel..." Hate it!
Diane doesn't seem to hate weeding. Sometimes, in fact, in seems as though she almost enjoys it, especially after a soaking rain when the weeds just give themselves over to her dirty little fingers. She says that weeding appeals to her anal side, which is funny because I've not really noticed that fastidious side in the house. It's almost like our brains are wired to notice different things inside versus outside. Inside, I am irked by crumbs and stains on the kitchen counters, crumpled tissues on the coffee table, shoes and random items of clothing strewn about. Those things have never phased Diane. But outside, get thy weedy asses outta here! Where I, if I even knew the difference between what's a weed and what's not, could care less about yanking it.
Which brings me to the third reason for Diane taking the lead in the weeding department—she knows what she's yanking. She knows the difference between poppies and poison ivy (which I have contracted in some crevice nearly every summer of my gardening career). I've improved over the years. While I've still yet to crack one of her gardening magazines, I've hung around long enough to at least add up one plus one. But in doing so, there's one question that continues to perplex me: What exactly constitutes a weed? It doesn't seem to have anything to do with whether the plant is native or invasive because we have plenty of each. Similarly, plants that flower versus those with interesting leaves doesn't seem to be the criteria. It doesn't matter whether they grow tall or short, produce thorns or sticky sap, or grow in a tight spiral versus wandering and climbing hither and yon.
What I've concluded after many not so careful years of observation is that the weed is in the eye of the planter. One gardener's weed is another's ground cover. Consider the common dandelion. Taraxacum officinale has been around for some 30 million years. Paleontologists find their fossilized remains in the fossilized teeth of fossilized mammoths. Archaeologists find dandelion bits stuck in the split wood handles of Paleolithic hoes. Dandelions have many positive attributes and yet they've been dogged by gardeners, lawn tenders, golfers, and dogs for centuries. Why are dandelions weeds? First of all, they're sunny. Who doesn't like the look of a tall, bright, puffy, yellow dandelion flower? What's not to like? They bloom early in the spring, bringing color and joy to those rainy days. Although they certainly spread, they don't climb over their neighbors. They don't have nasty thorns. You won't get an itchy, "kill me now" rash from accidentally brushing your skin against them.
They're edible. You can eat everything—flower, stem, leaves, roots. A quick Google search reveals that they're rich in vitamins A and C, calcium, and iron. They also contain detoxifiers which make them a useful ingredient in various medicines. Among their many medicinal qualities, they aid the liver, promote healthy digestion, and stimulate the pancreas to produce insulin. And teenagers, they can be used to treat acne. Baby! Why didn't I know that when I was 15?
They can also be used to enchant a toddler. Remember tickling a child's chin with the yellow flower and pretending that it proves he or she likes butter? And when said flower turns into a whispy puffball, said toddler can amuse themselves by blowing or otherwise twirling said puffball around, scattering it's seeds to the winds and chasing them with glee. It's every bit as good as blowing bubbles without the soapy mess.
Finally, you can also make wine with them. I mean, common on, people! What's a dandelion gotta do to get some love? I have no idea why Ray Bradbury named his book, Dandelion Wine. I didn't have to read that one in high school. But a plant with it's own publicist, that's gotta be worth something. Still, year after growing year, it's "Off with their heads!" [That's starting to feel like a recurring motif in this blog. Hmmmm? I should probably look at that.]