Can't hate dandelions

I know that for a lot of people, dandelions are the enemy. Or at the very least, a sign of someone who is slovenly about their lawn and DOESN'T CARE that their weeds will "infect" the neighborhood. (Or so I've been told).

I don't use a lawn service; it's an extension of my sensitivity to some chemicals, I'm leery of putting things on my lawn that I might react badly to. (And what might they do to the groundwater? Or the pollinators?). And I really only get dandelions in disturbed areas of my lawn - where the turf is intact, apparently they can't move in. The ones I have are mainly along the area that got torn up a little over a year ago when I had to have the water line to the house replaced. (I kept saying I was going to buy some St. Augustine sod and re-sod that area, but then the combination of a dry fall and being busy prevented that.)

But I can't hate dandelions - they are so useful to so many species. The warm days we've had here recently, I've seen honeybees and even a wasp visiting the flowers. I know they are favored by a lot of hymenopteran pollinators (which is interesting, given that some populations of dandelions are apomictic - that is, they produce their seeds clonally, without pollination - yet they go to all the "trouble" of making showy flowers).

And then yesterday afternoon, I happened to look out the window. Several of the dandelions had gone to fruit (forming what are sometimes called "blowballs" in British English - and what we always called "puffs" when I was a child). And there was a sparrow out there, wrestling with something whitish on my driveway. And at first I thought, did it get a packing peanut somewhere and is trying to eat it? And then I realized: it had cut one of the fruiting heads off the dandelion and was taking it apart to get the seeds - and then I saw other small birds (mostly sparrows) eating the seeds off of the other blowballs. I have never seen that before. (Small birds will eat lots of small weed seeds - goldfinches are well known for eating thistle seeds, but I've also seen them hanging on the old stalks of catnip, to get at the oil-laden catnip seeds).

And that makes me like dandelions a little bit better.

And of course, they're more generally edible: rabbits seem to relish both the leaves and the flower stalks. And I seem to remember my grandmother saying that when she was growing up and her family kept chickens, that dandelion greens were a favored food of the chickens. And of course, PEOPLE can eat dandelions (provided they haven't been sprayed): the leaves are edible (if rumored to be a diuretic; one of the French common names for the plant is pissenlit, the en lit part translates to "in the bed," and I doubt I have to translate that first part. The leaves are rich in Vitamin C (I think of the people in WWII Britain scouring the hedgerows for rosehips, so they wouldn't get scurvy at a time when citrus fruit was unobtainable. They could also have eaten dandelions....and doubtless some of them did)

The flowers can be used to make wine or a tea-like beverage, and you can eat the unopened flower buds. (The open flowers are not toxic or anything, I just think there's probably something about them that makes them a bit unpalatable). And I think the root is used in some herbal medicines.

Arguably, they could be seen as more generally useful than the much-loved tomato plant (all parts of which, other than the fruits, are toxic to humans). And I certainly have better success getting dandelion greens to grow than I have in getting tomatoes to set fruit....

I generally don't "treat" my lawn (and if I do, it's using some kind of organic application). Part of it is a cheapskate thing, part of it is a "my lawn looks fine to me as it is" thing (and it generally does). And part of it is, I admit, and ecologist thing - some of the stuff I've been reading on native bees suggests that some of their population declines may be traceable to the rise of the monoculture lawn, and the heavy use of chemicals sometimes needed to maintain that lawn. I'd rather have a few dandelions and a few Venus' looking-glass and a few windflowers, and get to see them and also have the bees and the birds hanging out in my lawn.

(Oddly enough, as I was composing this in my head and went over and checked over to see what Charles was writing about, I see he came up with something slightly similar. Must be the time of the year.)