So on TV the anti-dandelion commercials have been coming out, that is, commercials for lawn care (sic) chemicals. One of them has this lady and her husband and she just comes right out and says it, “We hate dandelions.” It’s shocking. It’s as if they are saying ,“We hate blacks” or “We hate Jews.” Is there any greater sign of the collective madness of this culture? I just don’t get it. They are flowers. They are pretty. They signify spring. They are edible and medicinal. It’s so sad. I overheard my neighbor once explaining to his grandkids about the chemicals he was putting on the lawn to get rid of those nasty weeds. Even people you would not expect get caught up in the perfect lawn craze. I spent some time in the home of a crunchy sort of woman who works at the Yestermorrow Design/Build School, a green architecture school in Vermont and she spent all day weeding the dandelions and when I went to the University of Vermont members of my environmental club spent some time lamenting about how much better the lawns were over at Middlebury.
Haha. What a bunch of retards. Did you tell them? Did you try to change their paradigm?
Well… We’ll all be eating Dandelions in a few years anyway.
"We hate dandelions." It's shocking. It's as if they are saying ,"We hate blacks" or "We hate Jews."
I feel the same way. It blows my mind how vehemently people hate them. I feel like we abos need to take back he word “weed” the same way the hip hop community has taken back the “N” word and the gay community is taking back the “F” word.
I asked my mother in law the other day if she had any dandelions in her yard (so I could put them on my sandwich), and she replied “God, I hope not!” I was shocked at how evil they are to her. And then I was mad that she had killed one of my favorite food friends.
yeah its rididculous to me. i came home the other day and my frontyard, which consists of bare dirt and two yuccas, was bursting with 4-8 inch green stalks that were speckled with purple flowers. below them were these purpleyblue bell things with white fringed tips. stunningly gorgeous.
i took photos cause purple is my favorite color and felt really lucky to have these things moving in for awhile.
the next day i heard my roommate on the phone with the landlord complaining about the weeds. when i got back from climbing they had been ‘weedwhacked’. hatecrime
oh man! people and their damn anal retentive attitudes towards weeds! good god!
i get 50 million pieces of mail from scott’s lawn service, i get their f***ing asshole “analysts” sneaking through my yard so they can provide a “custom analysis” and their salespeople stopping by my house 12 times a year!
one time (i think last year), i was out front doing something when one of them starts to come up the drive and starts out by saying “I hear you have a dandelion problem…” at which point I cut him off with a very curt “No, I sure don’t, I’m not interested, go away”. and I know who they “heard” that from too… stupid #K$# moth#$#s! sons %^#@*#!.. grr…
animalhands-
that’s horrible! those flowers do not look anything like what I would call a weed! I wonder what the origin of the word “weed” is and if it once meant something different and when the concept of a useless plant first originated. Seems like our treatment of wild plants basically mirrors our treatment of primitve/indigenous people conceptually, but herbalism and therefore weeds were still relied upon for a long time after civilization developed.
I love Dandelion greens. They are very good this time of year when the leaves are just sprouting up.
Not so bitter yet,but I have come to like thier bitterness somewhat.
I can eat them uncooked when they are full grown,though I havent ate a large amount this way not in one sitting anyway.
I think some of our taste buds have become as prejudiced as people are toward Dandelions.
I think we can do our part to influence a better attitude toward plants,
our kid friends arent as stuck in old ruts yet.
Speaking of Attitude’s I thought your video was hillarious Scout!
We have a cat like that… Ofthewood
I think some of our taste buds have become as prejudiced as people are toward Dandelions.
I totally agree, Ofthewood. I think that before we became accustomed to so much sweetness in our diets, we didn’t mind a little bitterness so much.
I eat at least a serving or more of dandelions a week. I like the opened flower heads the most, but the whole plant I eat sometimes, it depends. I like to eat the opened flowers raw, they leave my mouth with a sweet taste and my body feeling extremely well nurished if I eat enough. No wonder so many europeans grow it as a main food crop. Smart people! For about 18 years I thought dandelions were “poisonous and always just inedible weeds” to humans until I started reading Tom Brown jr. books and many herb identification guides and they all say that we can eat them.
“bless you dandelion and thank you for becoming our nurishment, medicine, and us”
I forget what the name of this species, but I remember that it carries large amounts of starch that we can extract to hold folds in our clothes and make them crisp!
Awesome pics, RRM! Mind if we add them to the wiki for the Dandelion page?
And if anyone can identify the other plant, we can get a page going for it, too.
The flowers are my favorite part to eat, too! The roots are pretty good as a boiled vegetable, too. I avoid the stems, though, since the latex is pretty bitter. But it is supposed to have good antifungal and antiviral properties. I used the sap to kill a wart once.
Thanks. Go ahead do whatever you want with the them. I’d love to help. My dad sometimes sucks the juice from the stems to relieve upset stomachs, relax the body, and as a laxitive. I like the bitterness sometimes myself and miss the whole plant sometimes during the winter.
The beautiful purple bell-like flower is a grape hyacinth. Looks like there are two or three more edible plants in the background of the dandelion picture! Is that a wild carrot leaf I spy? A plantain? The one with the reddish top is purple dead nettle, Lamium purpureum, no relation to real nettle. It is a member of the mint family, all of which have square stems, opposite leaves, and lobed flowers though it is not minty tasting. I believe there are no poisnous mints. It’s sister henbit, Lamium amplexicaule, is covered in Billy Joe Tatum’s Wild Food Field Guide and Cookbook and may be eaten raw or cooked. Purple dead nettle grew in our yard when I lived in Virginia but i forget what it tasted like. Okay this is just begging to go into the Wiki. Guess I’ll try my hand at starting a new page.
Okay this is just begging to go into the Wiki. Guess I'll try my hand at starting a new page.
Yay!!!
I believe there are no poisonous mints.
I second that belief. To get more specific with the safety, I believe Steve Brill says: if it has a square hollow stem and any kind of minty smell, it’s not poisonous.
It's sister henbit...
Isn’t that henbit in animalhands!'s grape hyacinth (thanks for IDing it, btw) picture earlier in this thread?
The one with the reddish top is purple dead nettle, Lamium purpureum, no relation to real nettle.
I just learned dead nettles this spring, since our yard was thick with them. I’ve also heard the same species called “red” deadnettles. Which I love for a band name. Maybe my Red Deadnettles could open for your Phragmites Go!, Emily. 
Rix- yeah you are right about that being henbit in Animalhands picture! and about red deadnettle. Now I just need to learn an instrument.
I read that Purple dead nettle “belongs” to the mint family but it doesn’t smell like peppermint, spearmint, pinnapple mint, or any other mint to me. Purple dead has a disguesting and unpleasant odor to me, I can’t see myself making a meal out of it ever unless starving, but on the another hand, I can see myself using it for internal and external medicine since I haven’t heard anything about it being poisonous. Also, I found this plant beginning to flower in late feburary. The site it tells me spring has started. Here are some picks that I’ve taken of it.
This thread is so timely for me. Just the other day, I was over at my in-laws’ house, and we were all sitting in the living room talking while the TV was on in the background. Since I’m not used to just leaving the TV on and ignoring it, the flickering light was constantly grabbing my attention. At one point, I glanced over to see a commercial with a green lawn divided by a white picket fence, and yellow flowers arranged in a neat circle on both sides. Two people were spraying the flowers; not listening to the commercial, I assumed it was a commercial for fertilizer, and the two people were in competition to see whose fertilizer could make their gardens more vibrant. Imagine my surprise when the commercial instead cut to a blasted wasteland, all the beautiful flowers gone. The only difference was, on one side there was brown - evidence that something had died there - while on the other side there was only endless, monotonous green. I was horrified.
You know, even before I became a primitivist, I didn’t understand the hatred of dandelions. I loved them because they were bright and festive (and, of course, fun to play with when they turned to little fluffballs). Their cheerful yellow broke up the monotony of a green lawn and seemed to shout to everyone, “Spring is here! Spring is here!” On top of that, I tried dandelion wine for the first time last year and found that it’s the only alcohol in the world that I can stand the taste of. ;D
Fun facts: the official name for dandelions is “taraxacum officinale,” which means “official remedy for disorders,” because it can treat just about any basic ailment. Dandelions also contain a ton of calcium, vitamin C, and vitamin A. Along with plantain (the weed, not the banana-like fruit), dandelions are probably the healthiest plant in this ecosystem. I suspect that’s because they’re both pioneer plants; they’re so full of nutrients so they can pour all those nutrients into the soil for other plants, later on in succession, to absorb.
That’s the really ironic part: “weeds” are the next wave of succession after grasses. The exact same thing that encourages grasses to grow, also encourages dandelions, plantain, and similar “weeds” to move in and take the grass’s place. That’s why they’re such a giant problem for wheat fields and suburban lawns alike. If we want to keep living like this, it will always be an endless battle against weeds, because you can never have grasses without “weeds.”
Of course, why you’d ever want to kill off such nutritional foods in order to encourage the regrowth of plants we can’t even digest properly (and don’t even try to eat, in the case of lawn grass) is certainly a mystery to be pondered.
Oh, by the way, this reminds me of a passage in a book I was reading a while ago. It’s a young adult novel - Split Screen by Brent Hartinger - and it was absolutely delightful except for this one passage that horrified me beyond belief. I swear, it was like, “Oh hi, Mother Culture! Don’t you just pop up in the most unexpected places?”
For example, I told everyone an idea I'd had a few months before, when I was weeding in our yard. "There should be something called National Dandelion Day," I said. ("What a fantastic idea!" Giuli thought to herself. "A whole day devoted to appreciating dandelions and spreading the word of their nutritional value! These characters are so lovably quirky and off-beat!") "On one day, every person in the world goes out and digs up all the dandelions in his yard at the very same time. Then there'd be no dandelions to go to seed and send their evil little parachutes out into the world. It would solve the dandelion problem forever. No one would ever have to weed again! Assuming everyone got the roots. You have to get all the root, or the damn thing grows back." "It wouldn't work," Min said. "Why not?" Gunnar asked. "I'd be into it." "Yeah," said Myron, Gunnar's eleven-year-old cousin. "Why not?" "Well," Min said, "there'd be plenty of jackasses who wouldn't do it. You know, all the idiots who rant and rave about how they don't want anyone telling them what to do with 'their' land? So they wouldn't weed their yards. And they'd sit on their porches with their shotguns to make sure no one else weeded their yards either. So their dandelions would keep growing, and then they'd go to seed, and they'd screw the whole thing up." "Min's right," Em said. "Some people have no idea about the common good. They bitch about low-flow toilets and they go out and buy a huge, expensive SUV and then flip out about the three-cent gas tax that's needed to pay for all the pollution and congestion they're causing. It's like they think they're the only people in the world."
First of all… the dandelion problem. Need more be said?
Second, of course you’d still have to weed, if you kept insisting on a boring green lawn. There isn’t just one “weed” in the world, you know.
Third, what does it say about our cultural worldview that the only reason Min can think of for not wanting to exterminate an entire species of plant for the sake of subjective aesthetics still stems from an assumption of ownership over nature?
Fourth, how the hell is it “the common good” to exterminate an entire species of plant because one subset of one culture in one species doesn’t think it looks pretty? What the fuck kind of “common good” is that, especially when the plant you’re talking about is the freaking taraxacum officinale?
Fifth, what’s with equating a refusal to poison the earth with owning giant SUVs?
Sixth… really? They think they’re the only people in the world? They don’t seem to care about the common good of everyone? I bet they even go around talking about how only they are conscious, and how nobody else matters because they’re the only intelligent ones. Funny, I think I know a few people like that…
Well, now that I’m done bitching about a book that I actually quite liked, except for that one short passage, I just got an idea. Why don’t we establish a National Dandelion Day? Only not the one Russel (the narrator) suggested. A day, let’s say in spring, where we all go out onto the street and hand out flyers with nutritional information about dandelions and give away free samples of things like dandelion jelly. (Not dandelion wine - that can get legally risky since you don’t know who’s over 21.) What do you guys think?
Wow, PP. You have found some horrifying civilized views. Thanks for sharing them with us.
From the “Why Mow?” article:
Much as we've come to distrust it, the urge to dominate nature is a deeply human one, and lawn mowing answers to it. I thought of the lawn mower as civilization's knife and my lawn as the hospitable plane it carved out of the wilderness. My lawn was a part of nature made fit for human habitation.
Poor civies. They’ll always be fighthing that which they could eat. Consequently, they’ll never know how nature can be far more “fit for human habitation” when we stop trying to strangle it and start learning to live in concert with it.