Blossom time

“These little earth stars... shimmering on the lawn...” ~ E.P. Roe, “The Home Acre,” Harper’s Magazine

My lawn is aglow with brilliant, bobbing “earth stars.”

My neighbours spray herbicides to wipe them out.

To please them, there have been years when I did my best to dig the dandelions out before they blossomed so the seeds wouldn’t repopulate the neighbourhood. The task was always less successful at stemming the yellow tide that seeped over the yard than our dykes, constantly shored up, are at holding back the Minas tide. Perhaps my heart wasn’t really in the work.

My heart is in agreement with the foreigner who was honoured to find, when he came to visit his Canadian friend, the garden was bursting with robust dandelions, planted specially in his honour. What else matches the dandelion’s flawless vigour, crowned in canary velvet?

Those who view the dandelion with a jaundiced eye consider them a noxious weed*, not a lawn jewel - as a weed pernicious, not a flower tenacious. This perspective is hard for me to achieve; memories, vivid with dandelions, intervene. Remember selling the first spring leaves to the corner grocery for a piece of penny candy? Imagine a warm spring day and a busy hour spent filling an old glass jar with the buzz of bumblebees and a jumble of yellow pompoms. Picture childish fingers fashioning link jewellery by plugging the smaller end of the hollow stem into the larger end. No one ever objected to us kids picking puffy dandelion bouquets, and Mum and Gram were always tickled to receive them.

Most its natural enemies (outside of the human race) live in Asia and Europe, so dandelions are probably here to stay. Perhaps there are a few birds that eat the seeds, but dandelions are so fruitful this is hardly a discouragement. Think of it, rather, as the dandelion sharing from its overabundance and generosity. To those who would battle the species to extinction, I would recall the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson: “A weed is just a plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered."

By this definition, the dandelion is not a weed. It has the virtue of being nutritious** and has been used for more than 1,000 years for many medicinal purposes.

If these two virtues do not persuade you to let the dandelion grow and blossom, there is always the one put forward by Environment Canada***. Being hardy and wide-spread, the dandelion is an excellent indicator of changes in the climate and environment. You may wish vile thoughts could discourage the yellow blossoms, but conditions like long, cold winters, a small amount of rain and lots of cloudy spring days are what really slow down the bloom. Report your blooming dandelions to the Ecological Monitoring and Assessment Network Coordinating Office, Environment Canada. They really want to know. * For the truth about Nova Scotian noxious weeds, http://www.gov.ns.ca/agri/rir/weeds/noxious.shtml ** For some ideas on how to turn dandelions into food, http://www.backwoodshome.com/articles2/kallas82.html; and why you might want to: http://www.pfaf.org/database/plants.php?Taraxacum+officinale ***http://www.naturewatch.ca/english/plantwatch/dandelion/fun_facts.html