Dandelion

The dandelion, Taraxacum officinale, is a familiar perennial weed of lawns and meadows, its bright yellow composite flower opening with the sun and closing at evening, then ripening into the silvery seed-clock whose parachuted seeds scatter on the wind. Its English name comes from the French dent de lion, lion's tooth, for the jagged leaf. Two of childhood's small rituals belong to it: telling the time by the number of breaths needed to blow away the seeds, and making a wish as they fly. Every part of the plant is edible, and it has long been gathered as a salad green and a country wine.

Taxonomically the dandelion is a notorious puzzle: because most dandelions reproduce asexually through seed produced without fertilisation, a process called apomixis, populations split into hundreds of genetically fixed microspecies across Europe, so that specialists distinguish many hundreds of named Taraxacum microspecies where a gardener sees only one plant, one of the more extreme cases of taxonomic complexity in any common weed. Roasted and ground, the root has long served as a caffeine-free coffee substitute, dandelion coffee, a use that became especially widespread in wartime Europe when real coffee was scarce or rationed.

Culpeper placed the dandelion under Jupiter, valuing it as a cleansing and opening herb, and its old use as a spring tonic and diuretic, preserved in the blunt country name piss-a-bed and the French pissenlit, is given here as folk history. Folklore read the plant as a little image of the heavens: its golden flower the sun, its silver seed-head the moon, its flying seeds the stars. It served in love-divination and in wishing, the scattered seeds said to carry a thought to an absent sweetheart. A weed to the gardener, the dandelion carries a gentle symbolism of wishes, time and the turning of the day.

In traditional Chinese medicine the dandelion, pu gong ying, has been used for many centuries as a cooling, detoxifying herb, a use recorded independently of, and long predating, the Western Culpeper tradition already noted here, the two systems arriving by entirely separate routes at a broadly similar reading of the plant as cleansing and cooling. Both traditions rest on the same plain plant, gathered wild rather than specially bred, which may be part of why its humble, ever-present nature invited so many independent peoples in different times and places to find a use for it.

Every part of the dandelion above and below ground has, at one time or another, found a use, root roasted for coffee, leaf eaten as salad green, flower turned into wine, a completeness of use shared by few other common weeds and part of why the plant has never quite lost its old reputation as a genuinely useful, rather than merely tolerated, presence in the garden.