Thoughts On Dandelions

Photo by Danielle Johnson

Birthday candles, coins tossed in fountains, stray eyelashes, wishbones and dandelions. Those are the five things I know to wish on, though one is more frowned upon than the others as you age.

As a kid outside, there was nothing more satisfying than finding a full dandelion with all of its tufts intact. The more intact, the more you felt your wish would come true, the more fluff you could watch sail through the air to an unknown destination. As a semi-adult, though, priorities are different. Now, the more intact the dandelion, the more offspring it will produce, the more “run-down” my lawn will be considered to passers-by, the more subject the flowers will be to a swift removal.

Granted, dandelions did not evolve to be dispersed by little girls and their wishes. The wind will do that just fine without us. But why do we care so much about dandelions among the many other introduced species in our yards? Chickweed, clovers, and ground ivy are just as prevalent and non-native, but we don’t go herbiciding and manually pulling them for unsightliness or fear of our neighbors whispering about our unkempt yards.

In a way, dandelions, or a lack thereof, are a status symbol.

If your yard is covered in yellow and white rather than green or some other brightly colored cultivated plant, you’re either too lazy, too poor, or too busy to get rid of them. Or perhaps you’re fed up with suburban standards of cookie-cutter lawns and say, “Heck with it, if the dandelions can compete so well, good for them.”

It’s not that getting rid of dandelions is a terrible act. I’ll admit that the reddish-green shoots aren’t the most visually appealing after their flowers are gone and the bald heads are left. However, if you think the dandelions are the only “weed” in your yard, look a little closer. Chances are high that it’s full of them if your idea of a weed is something that grows aggressively where you’d rather have plain grass. If you truly want to get rid of the weeds, which is a subjective term anyway, you probably need to swap in your whole lawn for native grasses and flowers. Native lawns are becoming more of a trend, or you could try dialing back on mowing to encourage wildflowers, a form of “conscious neglect,” according to botanist Trevor Dines.

Typical pristine grass lawns also pose problems by way of eliminating flowers for pollinators (in fact, bees love dandelions) and using large amounts of water and chemicals. (Ferris Jabr outlines these problems and a thorough history of lawns in “Outgrowing the Traditional Grass Lawn.”)

My dogs don’t seem to mind the taller grass at all. If anything, they like exploring it. Photo by Danielle Johnson

My family hasn’t mowed our own lawn in two weeks, and while much of it is still weedy, it’s turned into somewhat of a “shortgrass” prairie covered in smooth meadow-grass, and a little walnut tree has even popped up, so who knows what you may find when you forego the lawnmower.

If you do discover the perfect dandelion that gives you nostalgia of your wish-making days, maybe don’t feel so bad about blowing it. You can’t do much more damage than the wind would have. Maybe you can wish to undo the mass assimilation of lawns or at least start a reversion to native plants in yours.