Flowers we can pick (1) – Dandelion

Mark 17 Comments

Plantlife says that, provided we don’t go over the top, we can pick some of our commonest and prettiest flowers. That’s quite brave of them!  I’ll cover one of the ‘Pickable 12’ each week at relevant times through the spring and summer.

Let’s start with the Dandelion – and you can come pick them in the ‘lawn’ which is my back garden. No, Dandelions aren’t weeds – they are pretty, and pretty successful, plants.  Underrated because they are common but a lovely yellow and quite beautiful.  The Starlings of the plant world?

What do I know about Dandelions? Their flowers are yellow (see above), their name comes from the French for ‘teeth of the lions’, you can make wine from the flowers and add the leaves to salads. That’s a start isn’t it?

I’m amused that the Royal Horticultural Society regards Dandelions as ‘troublesome in lawns’.  They aren’t a bit troublesome in my lawn – they just sitting there looking pretty. I’ve never been bitten, growled at or chased around the garden by a Dandelion – maybe I have just been lucky.

I’m reminded (I often am actually) of what the great Dorothy Parker said, ‘You can lead a whore to culture, but you can’t make her think’ (perhaps when invited to speak to the American Horticultural Society or perhaps just when challenged to use horticulture in a witticism) which sounds like it is pretty un-PC these days, but it’s a bit odd that a horticultural society, royal or not, takes against some plants. The overlap between members of the RHS and Moorland Association is probably huge…

 

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17 Replies to “Flowers we can pick (1) – Dandelion”

  1. Try picking up Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine too. A captivating story of boyhood in early 20th century.

  3. Dandelion — a much favoured weed in this poor, sandy allotment.
    Every bit of root, during winter digging, is saved and thrown back – all for the promise of that extra buzz and colour in next season’s weedy rows of veg. But it’s not for just that – the plant’s very deep tap root will be retrieving all those leached out trace elements and returning them to the surface in its leaves. Many plants with flowers are hoed off but many survive close up to the crops.
    Here are some not so dainty rules for trespassing Dandelions:
    Pick’em; chop’em; weed’em; watch’em; puff’em; love’em.

  4. You have certainly picked a hard one first. Well done!
    I will admit, although my garden is not tidy, I do wage enough of a war that my lawn is not all dandelion. Daisies are welcome.

  5. Over 200 genetically different micro-species of dandelion in the UK alone…put that in your biodiversity pipe and smoke it!

  6. Dandelions are great for attracting insects, especially at this time year when there are few other flowers around. Look out for for particularly for hoverflies and solitary bees.

  7. Dandelion sap or “milk” will get rid of warts or verrucas after a few applications. It works – although turns them black in the process.

  8. I’ve always liked Dandelion flowers, I can remember nearly forty years ago driving through Shropshire towards Wales one spring and the roadside verges being fantastically yellow with a magnificent show of the flowers.
    Sometime later I related this to two redoubtable lady naturalists in Harrogate to be told a story of a young African who spent sometime in the county learning about practical conservation, I think with the county trust. At the end of his training tenure he was asked what he found most memorable about the UK. His simple answer was the riot of yellow on the spring roadside verges made by the humble Dandelion.

  9. There may be an overlap in the membership of the RHS and the MA but I daresay there is also an overlap with members of the RSPB. The desire to have an ‘impeccable’ lawn, or perfect roses or giant marrows may seem eccentric to those of us who are not keen gardeners but it is legal. Gardening is almost by definition about an artificial manipulation of nature to exclude some species and pamper and promote others but as long as it is carried out within the confines of gardens that is fair enough. The Moorland Association is an apologist/denialist for serious illegal behaviour and the elimination of certain species not just from the confines of gardens but from the countryside as a whole and it seems unfair to lump the RHS with them on the grounds that they designate some species as ‘weeds’.

  10. And there is that National Trust advert where they show people tidying up one of their woods. There are people actually sweeping the ground with brooms for heavens sake.

    2. It’s our national flower – whatever anyone else thinks. Great for early bumblebees too.

  11. The blazing colour in early spring, the striking flower shape, the foliage having interesting structural looks, and those puffy white seedheads; If they were hard to grow then we’d pay a fortune to have them in our gardens. I have no problem with them, they are fantastic little flowers. A potentially useful foodcrop too, if Trump and Putin decide to press the button.

  12. In the early 90s a new mowing approach at Westonbirt Arboretum moved from mowing everything to just mowing paths in Silk Wood in the spring. Unexpectedly, it created a new spectacle – the marvellous colour combination of bluebells poking out of the woodland edge merging with Dandelions out in the open grassland – really stunning, and worth going to see in its own right.

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