OUR MOST MAGICAL WEED
You can admire its bloom – though it drives gardeners to distraction – eat it and even drink it. But you can’t keep the dandelion down!
Never have I seen so many dandelions as, this spring and summer, have clotted meadows and verges, bobbed by the dozen from every patch of waste ground and made a determined bid to annexe my patio.
Swathes go to seed at once, and for a day or three there have been those gauzy, spherical ‘dandelion clocks,’ a fluff of seeds each with its own tiny parachute. Then, windblown, they lie in drifts in gutters, as if someone had burst an eiderdown, or float on every breeze, each determined on its own cranny somewhere and its own most determined life.
Taraxacum officinale is a tap-rooted, perennial herbaceous plant, native to temperate regions in the Northern Hemisphere and of extraordinary tenacity. It is extremely difficult to kill, even a fragment of root left behind being sufficient to beget an entire new plant. Its seeding system is one of quiet brilliance.
Dandelions can thus very quickly colonise any broken or disturbed soil and have long, accordingly, been loathed by gardeners and farmers. Most of us can remember, as children, being sternly rebuked for blowing clean a dandelion clock (‘You’re spreading them!’). No plant on earth, probably, has done more for the sales of domestic weedkiller, especially as since late victorian times we have all become so keen on lawns.
But the plant, with its golden bloom and hollow stem and fluffy clock, will always fascinate youngsters. From time immemorial, dandelions have been woven into rather splendid floral crowns. Widespread in Scotland was the girlish lore that, the longer you took to blow off their parachutes, the more years you would be single and unwed.
Our forebears, in an age when foraging still mattered – especially in the scant days of spring, when the most you could hope from a typical doctor was that he would not inadvertently kill you – felt very differently about the dandelion.
So prized was the plant that when the Pilgrim Fathers set off for America on the fabled Mayflower they made sure to take dandelion seed with them (and thus introduced it to that continent).
For one thing, every single part of the dandelion can be eaten, even the parachuted seeds. The blanched young leaves make a lively salad, sautéed, an interesting side dish. Wines and ales can be whipped up from the flowers and the root, dried and ground, makes an interesting, caffeine-free substitute for coffee.
You can still buy dandelion and burdock pop, a victorian invention, and it is a central ingredient to a similar US refreshment, root beer.
DANDELIONS, then, were a cherished resource, consumed since prehistoric times. The plant’s vigour lets you cut-and-come-again and – replete with calcium, potassium, iron and manganese, rich with vitamins A, C and K – it is highly nutritious.
It has also long been prized as medicine. The Chinese swear by it and devotees still resort to dandelion in the US and europe. Its most notorious property is as an effective diuretic; ‘pee-the-bed’ is an old english name for the plant and, in rare concord, it is ‘pissenlit’ to the French. The old and more decorous Scots name is ‘milk-gowan’, inspired no doubt by its white and bitter sap, though it has a darker handle – ‘the Deil’s milk-pail’.
Dandelion is esteemed as a tonic, a cleanser and a purgative. It is said to be most useful for women’s troubles and has been poulticed for the treatment of boils and cysts.
In Orkney, one scholar wrote in 1914 after years of acquainting himself with local folk medicine, a brew of the roots was taken for stomach and liver disorders and an infusion of the flowers was drunk for colds.
elsewhere, the sap – directly applied – was thought to cure warts.
even as late as the Great War, dandelions had their place in conventional medicine. When the conflict throttled pharmaceutical supplies from the Continent, dandelions were among various species grown intensively on an edinburgh site, near the royal Botanic Garden. Local wags quickly dubbed it ‘the Pharma-Farm’.
Homeopathic practitioners insist that, as a powerful dose of dandelion causes enuresis, a decoction of the plant – ‘titrated’ time and again in water till it is most unlikely any molecules of dandelion survive – can cure it.
Like all herbal medicines, in excess it can be dangerous; its high potassium level can affect heart rhythm. even the authors of Flora Celtica admit dandelion leaves ‘are now only used by more adventurous salad makers’.
The plant has, though, been of service in past and imaginative ways. ‘When stationed at Tain during the war with the RAF,’ one veteran recalled for Southampton’s Plant Lore Archive, ‘we could build up a bicycle from a pile of bits and pieces in a large shed.
‘One problem was a shortage of tyre valve tubing. Some bright spark discovered a three-quarter length of dandelion stem would keep us going a few miles and the rest of the stem was kept as spare. It would have been interesting to have worked out how many miles to the stem we could have done.’
It is almost as adored among the more fanatical botanists as the snowdrop. Taraxologists – the clue is in the name – have been eagerly identifying different strains since the 18th century. So far, more than 200 variants have been classified.
But even if you do not feel like supping on dandelion flower risotto (an example I have not invented) and would rather nip down to Boots for some over-thecounter treatment, dandelions remain of great ecological importance.
That is as a food resource for wildlife and, in particular, bees and other pollinators. The plant is, after all, perennial; it is among our first flowers to bloom and it remains in flower from March to November. Though neither its nectar nor pollen is as rich as those from, say, clover or vetches, it is available – and invaluable – at the bookends of the season when nothing else is in flower.
WHY are dandelions so prolific this summer? Probably because we had an exceptionally mild and protracted autumn, a long winter, unusually cold and dry, and a late spring, no less cold and dry. Dandelions had last year an unusually long period to be fruitful and multiply and exceptional spring weather that badly hampered the opposition.
Clotted with eager and hungry little visitors, they are not without charm. ‘I’ve seen many types of bee visiting dandelions,’ enthuses Kate Bradbury, author of The Wildlife Garden, ‘and I’ve rescued grounded bumblebees by popping them on a dandelion flower, watching them probe the florets for lifegiving nectar they would have surely died without.
‘My favourite bumblebee, the red-tailed Bombus lapidarius, apparently prefers yellow blooms and it’s this one I see most on dandelions. I’m fizzing with excitement seeing them together again.
‘Think of the bumblebee that’s spent winter in a hole and hasn’t eaten since July, or the hoverfly that’s flown here from the Continent, or the butterfly that needs nectar to give it the energy to find a mate. So please, think before you kill your dandelions.’
I like them in distant corners and in the wild, tolerate them by the woodpile and in patches of grass inaccessible to mower or strimmer.
But I draw the line at my paving and last week set about them with a singularly nasty spray. They are down and dead now, desiccated and fraying. I nevertheless felt, ever so slightly, a murderer.