Reclaims lands
CHURCHILL
Mohicans regain ownership of 156 acres along the Hudson River.
In Washington Park on Friday, admirers gawked and cooed at the celebrated spring tulips. They took photos of them. They crouched for a closer look. They chattered about the brilliant colors.
There was another flower prevalent in the park, its small yellow blooms dotting the green grass. They received little attention or respect. No gardener had attended to their needs. They were dandelions, and they earned no praise.
It is tempting to call them the Rodney Dangerfield of flowers, except it’s worse than that. People don’t just disrespect or ignore dandelions. They actively and aggressively despise them.
American homeowners dump 80 million pounds of herbicides, including suspected carcinogens, on their lawns as they try to eradicate the humble flower
and other interlopers, unaware or uncaring of the devastating effect on birds, butterflies and other wildlife. Dandelions are considered a blight. An outrage, even. Weeds, dastardly weeds.
“It’s one plant people hate with a passion,” Anita Sanchez told me. “I’ve even had people really get mad at me for saying nice things about dandelions.”
That’s right, Sanchez is dandelion admirer — a modern-day heretic, in other words. The Fonda resident, formerly an environmental educator with the state Department of Conservation, has even written a book about the flower, “The Teeth of the Lion: The Story of the Beloved and Despised Dandelion.”
As her writing details, the hatred of dandelions is a relatively new phenomenon. For much of human history, the flower and its leaves were revered as a source of medicine, food, tea, wine and beauty.
Greek philosophers found lessons in its petals. Early American settlers imported dandelions for use as household medicinal herbs. Japanese gardeners formed horticultural societies devoted to the flower’s beauty.
“No other flower in the world has been linked with such a wildly diverse assortment of cultures and times,” Sanchez writes.
Yet in this country, dandelions fell out of favor with the rise of the suburban lawn and a new standard of beauty, fed by advertising dollars, that fetishized the monoculture of a lush, green carpet. The dandelion became the intruder. The enemy of perfection. A weed.
An irony, though, is that by devoting so much space and attention to our lawns, we’ve created the perfectly pampered environment for dandelions to flourish. So we turn to toxins, waging an endless and fruitless war, poisoning the planet (and perhaps ourselves) as we go.
“Probably no other plant in the world undergoes such a barrage of deadly chemicals,” Sanchez notes, adding that “dandelions are like the determined survivors of a shipwreck or plane crash that will eat anything, use anything, do anything to stay alive.”
There’s something admirable about that tenacity, if we choose to see it. There is also beauty in dandelions, the rich-toned yellow of their flower magically evolving into a white puff ball of seeds that waits for the breeze.
But we’re blind to that now, mostly. The relentlessness of the flower seems to have frustrated our patience.
Can we ever admire the humble dandelion again?
Doing so would probably require a shift in perspective. We’d have to accept less control over nature. We’d need to embrace imperfection and invite more life into our yards. We’d need to see more value in things divorced from the culture of marketing and profit.
“The world is in fact full of free things that are delightful. Flowers,” said the Kentucky writer and farmer Wendell Berry. “The world is also full of people who would rather pay for something to kill the dandelions than to appreciate the dandelions. Well, I’m a dandelion man myself.”
We don’t need to love, or even like, dandelions to tolerate them a little more. We can learn to live with them, choosing not to obliterate them with glyphosate and other poisons that taint the soil and waters. A truce could end the chemical war.
In these parts, dandelions herald our muchanticipated spring, replacing the snow and ice of our comatose winter with their life. Dandelions promise long summer days and lightning-bug nights. They’re with us on picnics. They brush against our flip-flops.
Are they really so awful?
Sanchez mentioned that children often love dandelions. Perhaps that’s because it’s the only flower they’re allowed to pick. Or maybe they haven’t yet been told that dandelions are something to despise.
To children, the dandelion is a flower, not a pest. The plant’s bloom is a small beauty, its seeds a wish ready to take flight. It is a nice way to see the world, really. It’s a shame we grow out of it.
So, go to the park and coo at the famous tulips. Make them the star of your photos and the focus of your attention. But consider the dandelions.
They are there, in the background, waiting for a few kind words.