In heart of spring, Boulder sprouts dandelion devotees

A handful of adults in a field picking flowers with their children on a sunny afternoon might not raise many eyebrows in Boulder.

But look a little closer. The blossoms being methodically pinched from their stems and carefully stowed away in hand-woven baskets or paper bags are dandelions. Branded as blight by many who would aspire to the perfect lawn and targeted for aggressive intervention, they are avidly sought after by others who prize them for an array of properties ranging from the nutritional to the medicinal and beyond.

On a recent mellow afternoon in north Boulder, Gabriel Laperle of Lafayette and a few fellow enthusiasts deployed to a verdant expanse near the Wonderland Creek Bikeway, gathering dandelion blossoms before the ideal twoweek window for doing so closed for the season.

Laperle, in particular would be hard to miss, his luxuriant dreadlocks blossoming from beneath a head scarf, the green ink of the tattooed Sanskrit mantra “Om tare tuttare ture soha” below his neckline, and a laid-back demeanor set several notches south of chillaxed.

“We get stopped all the time by people asking what we’re doing. Generally, they’re just curious and think it’s really cool,” Laperle said.

“The No. 1 question I get is ‘Oh what is that for? What is it good for? How do you use it?’ ”

Try, just about everything. Laperle, a clinical herbalist and nonpracticing Unitarian minister, is a graduate of Naropa University and the Colorado School of Clinical Herbalism in Lafayette, and commutes to Nederland to work at Alpine Botanicals. So, he knows the turf.

“I teach a lot on invasive weed medicine and using, just, weedy species that most people overlook,” said Laperle, 29. “It’s kind of one of my missions to get that information out, and to make medicine out of plants that people would normally kill. There’s some really awesome medicinal plants.”

Of which dandelions, omnipresent in the Boulder Valley this time of year, are most certainly one.

A self-described “phytochemsitry geek,” passionate about the beneficial chemical properties of plants, Laperle can go on for some length about the righteous qualities of dandelions, known to botanists as Taraxacum officinale.

“With dandelions, people know about the roots, but the flowers often get overlooked. And they’re only around for a couple of weeks in the spring. So you kind of have to get out and do it,” he said.

“The flowers are their own medicine, and have wonderful antioxidant properties,” he said, going on to cite the presence of lutein and zeaxanthin, which herbalists prize for their role in protecting the macula lutea of the retina against ultraviolet damage and the potential development of macular degeneration.

While the dandelion is beneficial to humans, he added, it also is a critical ecosystem support to pollinators.

“They’re a really important source of food for bees early in the season. It’s very important for bees to have dandelions around, and to have dandelions that aren’t sprayed with chemicals,” Laperle said. “I would very definitely tell people to stop spraying their dandelions.”

And like most things in life, the dandelion, he will tell you, has its seasons.

“In the spring you just pick the flowers, or the greens, if you want them, but it’s already a little late for the greens. They’re a little bitter by now. The root is generally harvested in the fall,” he said. “But we also like to pick other wild edibles and medicinal plants that are around as well. So like this last time we were out, we picked a bunch of wild mustard that was nearby. There was a good stand of garlic mustard, and blue mustard, and we got a bunch of those and made a pesto.”

Lisa Ganora was happy to hear that her former student is spreading the message of better living through maximizing the living things all around us that others might figuratively, or literally, just sneeze at.

“He’s quite the picturesque hippie character, too,” said Ganora, director of the Colorado School of Clinical Herbalism.

She then volunteered that her students, who number up to 80 a year, engage in more than a halfdozen different courses of study, “They’re not all like that, just so you know.

She added: “It’s such a stereotype that the herbalists are hippies. That was more true back in the day. It has become more mainstream and integrated into, quote, normal society.”

The Colorado School of Clinical Herbalism had been in Boulder until June of last year, before being chased eastward, like so many others, by, as Ganora said, “gentrification.” It now is based out of “old Old Town Lafayette,” as Ganoraputit,at424E.SimpsonSt. But its footprint in the state goes far beyond, thanks to its partnership with Elderberry’s Farm in Paonia, where the range of summer programs includes a “Summer Solstice Mead Weekend” and a “Wise Women Week” at summer’s end.

Ganora is well aware that plenty of folks look at dandelions merely as “weeds you just need to get rid of.

“But we see little sunshine-stars dotting the lawn,” she said. “They are like a medicinal food. That’s the kind of plants I really like. They have a very low toxicity. They are almost like they are nature’s superfoods. They are not exotic — and they grow everywhere.”