A Treatise for Dandelion Season

A little bit of sympathy for a common weed

In the brief three hundred thousand years in which homo sapiens’ existence has overlapped with dandelions’ thirty million year temporal range, it’s only been in the spectacularly recent few decades that their name has become near-synonymous with weeds. 

Before we began to regard them with disdain, dandelion’s success owed not entirely to chance and adaptation, as is the case with most ecological exchange, but in part to us, cultivated and spread by humans for their many practical uses. Before that, they had seen wide growth across Eurasia and into Africa, where they were used both in medicine and as food and herbs in a tradition reaching so far back into human history that we don’t actually know when it started. And before that, humans and dandelions didn’t interact at all, because for the vast, vast majority of their existence, there weren’t yet any humans to harvest them, introduce them to new continents, make wishes on their seeds, or spray them with pesticides.

Though aided by other forces of modernization, the change in their reputation has come almost entirely as a result of the advent of lawn care, an import from the UK, where precipitation averages far higher than the majority of the US, making lawncare a more feasible endeavor. Once having a pristine lawn became culturally desirable, anything that marred it was marked as the enemy, including largely innocuous—and in fact, often beneficial—yellow flowers. But the ritual of tearing up dandelions by their roots and deterring children from the joyful spreading of their seeds comes at a cost. Lawns have fallen into the crosshairs of environmentalists in recent years, their human favoritism resulting in excessive water use and replacement of native plantlife which is more harmful, in most places, than the humble dandelion could ever hope to be. There’s another essay worth writing in this subject alone, a fact evident by the sheer amount of people who have saved me the time by already writing it.

On a moral level, I’ve always felt bad for weeds, a moniker that isn’t even a taxonomic classification, but an entirely cultural one. The only difference between a dandelion and, say, a sunflower, a plant belonging to the same genus, is that humans have decided they prefer one over the other. 

In the modern era, that’s what a species’ survival often comes down to—whether or not we care about them. The prime example here are pandas, the species most often talked about when we talk about charismatic megafauna—large, noticeable animals whose survival we prioritize for little reason other than that they’re popular with us. In the midst of our planet’s sixth mass extinction, an event brought on almost wholly by human action; the disruption of the environment through hunting, industrialization, and pollution which has lead the extinction of countless unremembered species that would otherwise be thriving, pandas seem hellbent on going extinct purely of their own accord. That they haven’t is owed to countless hours and dollars put toward their conservation efforts for one simple reason—because we like them. We think they’re cute, so they get to live. 

In fairness, this isn’t entirely our fault. Cuteness is an evolutionary advantage which evolved to keep us from abandoning our young when they’re too young to fend for themselves, no matter how irritating they may be or how much they tax our energy and resources. We can’t really help the things we find cute, just like the things we don’t can’t help having that disadvantage, lacking some trait or another that their counterparts likely evolved into entirely by accident.

But there’s always the chance, as is the case with dandelions, that some arbitrary switch flips, and suddenly a species humans have been happily cohabitating with for practically our entire existence is deemed no longer worthy of our affection, and we decide to punish them for the reproductive prowess which has allowed them to live this long, and we think nothing of it when we rip them out of our lawns or spray them with pesticides that do just as much harm to them as they do to native wildflowers, butterflies, bees, and other species we have deemed worthy of living.

I say all this ‘we’ stuff very broadly—when it comes to the issue of lawn v. dandelion, I am very firmly in the dandelion’s corner, and you very well might feel the same. There’s something intensely joyful about them; not just in making wishes on the puffy white seedheads (also, apparently, called blowballs) and watching them scatter on your breath, but in the bright, cheerful dots of highly saturated yellow across an otherwise uniform space.

There’s some controversy over how to classify dandelions—they’re so good at adapting to best suit their environmental conditions and those seed heads are so efficient in spreading that there’s now somewhere between two thousand and three thousand dandelion subspecies. Depending on where you’re reading this, your dandelions might look quite different from mine, although taraxacum officinale, the common dandelion which you’re probably picturing, remains king.

Their name comes not from the fluffy yellow blooms that so resemble a lion’s mane—as I’d assumed—but is in fact a reference to their jagged leaves, a bastardization of the french dent-de-lion, or lion’s tooth. They are the rare plant whose entirety is edible, and in addition, are nutritious; high in vitamins and containing beneficial amounts of other nutrients. The yellow flowers can be used to make dye, both their seeds and the plant themselves are a source of food for a variety of animal species, and their early blooming period means they are a reliable resource crucial to pollinators at the beginning of the season when other blooming plants are not yet available.

But all this is not to say that dandelions are free of shortcomings—in their massive geographical range, they are sometimes considered an invasive species, outcompeting native plants for space and resources. This is, however, entirely dependent on the location, like Alaska’s Denali National Park, where “Dandelion Demolition Day” is held annually. But don’t hold it against them—any plant will proliferate given the right environment, including the houseplants on which we so lovingly dote and the garden flowers from which we keep separate from dandelions, as if they’re a bad influence. Any species will spread as far as they are able, even to the point of destroying others at the cost of their success—ours does.

Very recently and through no fault of their own, dandelions lost our favor because of a human fad which, at least in North American climates, is wildly unsustainable. That doesn’t mean they’re about to go extinct—far from it, despite our folly they’re still doing fine—but this bad turn is one that can come to any species, at any time, based entirely on human whims.

In the places where their existence is neutral, or in fact a net positive, a species’ success or failure should be determined by the qualities of their own ability to adapt, not, as it currently is, by their charisma—by how much we like them, or by what they can do for us. The things we do like, the things that are useful to us, thrive. The things we don’t, the ʻōʻō’s and the golden toad and a million unique species of insects endemic to highly specific environments which no one discovered in time to miss or even notice before deforestation eradicated the last of them, fade. It’ll be a long period of sustained hatred before this plight comes for the dandelion, but that doesn’t mean it can’t, or won’t. But as long as we reserve some fondness for them, even if it’s no longer a universal one, as long as we keep making wishes and watching the seed heads scatter on the wind and smiling at the sight of bright yellow polka dots when they crop up, there will always be a fighting chance for the dandelion.

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