Round Robin: Misunderstanding the Dandelion

Article Tools

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

WOLFTOWN, Virginia—I watch “Star Trek” on television with my husband sometimes and I come away horrified that life inside such a sterile environment of steel and plastic could be the way our grandchildren will live: hours, days, and weeks in front of various computers, never digging in the earth, growing plants, or watching or listening to the birds. I can’t imagine having no blackberries to pick, no lavender to sniff and to tuck in among my lingerie, no lemon verbena to gather for tea.

I subscribe to the unoriginal idea that the Creator of all things (substitute your own words—Guided Intelligence, Great Spirit, Essence) has provided plants that serve our every need. I believe that when we respect and honor the values of these freely given gifts, we fill a spiritual as well as a physical need, and that the stress and strife in our lives increase when we are disconnected from our roots in nature. The popularity of “Star Trek” seems to indicate that we’re headed toward further disconnection.

I often use the dandelion as a metaphor for these gifts. The “lowly” dandelion, that lovely yellow-flowered lawn weed, can brighten and lift our spring spirits—if only we’d let it. Instead, we’ve been persuaded that the dandelion is a pernicious weed that should be eradicated. The vocabulary of the “killing fields”—insecticides, herbicides, nematocides and so on—is pathological; it shapes our point of view, wins our allegiance and eventually is transformed into an attitude, buried deep in our unconscious, which alters the way we see the world underfoot.

If we take a new look at the cheerful dandelion that graces our lawns and fields, we can see that it is a lovely and hardy plant. If we also consider the many ways it can feed and heal us, we might change our language (and thereby our attitude) regarding the dandelion and its many “weedy” brothers and sisters: plantain, chickweed, cleavers, chicory, dock, lamb’s-quarters, stinging nettle, St.-John’s-wort, cattails, pennyroyal and hundreds more. Even thorny horse nettle contains the powerful drug scopolamine, and poison ivy keeps the birds happy in fall and blesses us with fantastic tawny orange foliage. As my friend Doris Bankes says, “Termites are great. They eat lots of dead wood and turn it into compost. It isn’t their fault that we build our houses out of dead wood!”

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print