Dandelions Story

I shared this story in my cooking class yesterday, because this time of the year, the first thing to come out from the ground after a cold winter in Wyoming, I harvest dandelions from our backyard to make salad or edible wild greens (namul muchim). That is why I enjoyed reading this story so much. The author of this story and I have had the same thoughts about dandelions for a long time.  I taught a class on preparing edible wild greens last year at our health retreat, the most common weed being dandelions.  Enjoy this story as much as I did and come back to my blog to learn how to make delicious side dishes such as dandelion leaves salad, edible wild greens marinated side dish.


MR. WASHINGTON WAS A HARD-CORE LAWN freak. His yard and my yard blended together in an ambiguous fashion. Every year he was seized by a kind of herbicidal mania. He started fondling his weed-eater and mixing up vile potions in vats in his garage. It usually added up to trouble.

Sure enough, one morning I caught him over in my yard spraying dandelions. "Didn't really think you'd mind,'' says he, righteously.
 "Mind, mind!—you just killed my flowers," says I, with guarded contempt.
 "Flowers?" he ripostes. "Those are weeds!" He points at my dandelions with utter disdain.
"Weeds," says I, "are plants growing where people don't want them. In other words," says I, "weeds are in the eye of the beholder. And as far as I am concerned, dandelions are not weeds—they are flowers!"
 “Horse manure,'' says he, and stomps off home to avoid any taint of lunacy. [pg. 63 ROBERT FULGHUM]
     
      Now I happen to like dandelions a lot. They cover my yard each spring with fine yellow flowers, with no help from me at all. They mind their business and I mind mine. The young leaves make a spicy salad. The flowers add fine flavor and elegant color to a classic light wine. Toast the roots, grind and brew, and you have a palatable coffee. The tenderest shoots make a tonic tea. The dried mature leaves are high in iron, vitamins A and C, and make a good laxative. Bees favor dandelions, and the cooperative result is high-class honey.
      Dandelions have been around for about thirty million years; there are fossils. The nearest relatives are lettuce and chicory. Formally classed as perennial herbs of the genus Taraxacum of the family asteraceae. The name comes from the French for lion's tooth, dent de lion. Distributed all over Europe, Asia, and North America, they got there on their own. Resistant to disease, bugs, heat, cold, wind, rain, and human beings.
      If dandelions were rare and fragile, people would knock themselves out to pay $14.95 a plant, raise them by hand in greenhouses, and form dandelion societies and all that. But they are everywhere and don't need us and kind of do what they please. So we call them “weeds,” and murder them at every opportunity.
    Well, I say they are flowers, and pretty fine flowers at that. And I am honored to have [pg. 66 ALL I REALLY NEED TO KNOW…] them in my yard, where I want them. Besides, in addition to every other good thing about them, they are magic. When the flower turns to seed, you can blow them off the stem, and if you blow just right and all those little helicopters fly away, you get your wish. Magic. Or if you are a lover, they twine nicely into a wreath for your friend's hair.
     I defy my neighbor to show me anything in his yard that compares with dandelions.
     And if all that isn't enough, consider this: Dandelions are free. Nobody ever complains about your picking them. You can have all you can carry away. Some weed!

 Originally published in All I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, Robert L. Fulgum (New York: Random House Publishing Group: 2003), pp. 65–67. Reformatted by BYU-Idaho for accessibility purposes, 3 October 2014.