In Praise of Dandelions

A perfect day for autumn gardening today - until the rain came at about five o'clock, anyway.  I've weeded through a large bed of perennials and shrubs, and cleared some smaller beds too.  I'm fascinated by weeds, their adaptability and the speed with which they claim or reclaim any piece of bare ground.  But I have a special place in my heart for dandelions.

It may be because they were flowers we loved to pick and to play with as small children.  Children today still enjoy blowing on dandelion "clocks", much to the despair of anyone trying to keep a clean and tidy garden nearby!  They are splendid flowers of course, especially in the spring season when they line the roadsides and cover many a field, but they are also a bane to the gardener, with their deep taproot, easily broken when pulling so that the plant can sprout again from the remnant, and of course those floaty seeds so quickly released into the wind by children 'telling the time'.

The name dandelion comes from the French dents de lion, lion's teeth, a fanciful description perhaps of the densely packed florets (each one in reality a small adapted flower) that together make up the flower head.  Such a common and pervasive weed has many local names, of course, but one that is quite widespread is "piss-a-bed", for the dandelion has, I gather, a diuretic effect.  Whether the root, dried and roasted and drunk as a sort of coffee substitute, would have that effect, I don't know.  I haven't tried it, though I see you can get dandelion coffee in some health food shops.  Like many weeds, it isn't completely useless, and has been used in medicine and herbalism as well as in place of coffee, over the years:  its botanical name of Taraxacum officinale combines a generic name that I think comes originally from Persian, via Arabic, and would have been used by the pharmacists of long ago who collected it for medical use.  Any plant with the specific name officinale, or officinalis, would have been the type specimen used in medical preparation.

These days I, like all gardeners, do regular battle with dandelions.  But I do so with more than a grudging respect, and I was quite pleased yesterday therefore to hear a harvest festival sermon that was in part at least, in praise of dandelions.  Why in praise?  Well, mostly because dandelions are the great exploiters;  as our preacher reminded us, "they grow anywhere and everywhere."  It's all very well to aim to be like productive wheat, as the parable reminds us we should, bearing "thirty fold, and sixty fold, and an hundred fold".  But let's also aim for something of the dandelion's stickability, its readiness to exploit every opportunity for growth, its ability to do well in quite unpromising soil (and even the cracks between the slabs of my patio, from which I can never dislodge them).  And what about that deep tap root, giving dandelions the ability to come back and rejuvenate themselves, even from quite unpromising situations?

Perhaps we might find more insights and challenges for the Church in mission from a study of the dandelion than from many a more obvious harvest crop.  Nonetheless, I don't expect to see large numbers of dandelions among the harvest decorations in my local church any time soon!