Song of the Week: “Dandelions,” by Ruth B. - “I’m in a field of dandelions / Wishing on every one that you’d be mine”
This past Sunday, I went hiking at the Rockwood Conservation Area with my family for Mother’s Day.
Near the end of the hike, I spotted a man waiting patiently for his children, who were exploring a nearby cave. Perched precariously atop his bald head was a flower crown made entirely of dandelions.
I was struck immediately by the wonderful cheerfulness of his headgear, and the realization that you don’t see many dandelion crowns.
Despite their bright yellow color and accessibility as a construction material, we have failed to romanticize dandelions like we have daisies or other wildflowers, and you won’t see them in a dreamy photo shoot or ad for Anthropologie.
Indeed, I had spent the last hour identifying flowers and plants, but until I saw that dandelion flower crown, I had barely noticed the dandelions that littered the forest floor.
They appeared, as suddenly as they always do, in the last three weeks, and immediately my brain slotted them into the background.
Dandelions don’t count, right? They’re weeds, not flowers. Do they deserve crowning?
Roots and Beginnings
Growing up, whenever we saw a dandelion standing alone in a field, my cousins would quote this scene from the movie Ice Age: “A dandelion! Must be the last one of the season!”
Rewatching the clip, I immediately wondered whether this scene was accurate. Were there really recognizable dandelions during the period when the movie is set - 20,000 years ago?
The answer, it turns out, is an easy yes. Paleontologists estimate that dandelions are more than thirty million years old. In 2010, the New York Times published fossil research suggesting that similar flowers in dandelions’ larger family, asteraceae - which also includes daisies, sunflowers, and artichokes - could be almost 50 million years old.
Flowers in the family asteraceae don’t have single flowers, but rather flower heads, or pseudanthium - clusters of tiny florets. In dandelions, these tiny individual florets each transform into a seed suspended from a wispy, umbrella-like plume, or pappus: what people sometimes call “dandelion clocks” or “blowballs.”1
With one gust of wind (or child making a wish), a single dandelion can send out 54-172 seeds to colonize the nearby landscape. Even more efficiently, dandelions don’t need pollination: while they serve as an important early spring source of nectar for bees and other pollinating insects, dandelions can clone themselves, creating genetically identical offspring.
This combination of factors has allowed dandelions to spread to every continent other than Antarctica. Their ubiquity is demonstrated in their wealth of names. In English we call them dandelions, from the French dent-de-lion, or “lion’s tooth,” because of their jagged leaves. They have also been called the white endive, wild endive, blowball, cankerwort, doon-head-clock, witch’s gowan, milk witch, lion’s tooth, yellow-gowan, Irish daisy, monks-head, priest’s-crown, puff-ball, faceclock, pee-a-bed, wet-a-bed, and swine’s snout.
As you may be able to tell from those names, we aren’t generally the biggest fans these days.
While dandelions are considered invasive species in some fragile biomes, such as Alaska - Denali National Park hosts an annual “Dandelion Demolition” event - in most places, dandelions don’t actually do much damage. They grow best in soil that has already been disturbed, and their quick life cycle and ensuing decay actually often enriches the soil around them.
We consider dandelions “weeds,” then, not as a botanical classification, but rather as a cultural one. Weeds, simply put, are plants where we don’t want them to be. And, for many of us, dandelions are our particular, neon-yellow enemies in a constant war waged over our lawns.
As John Green explains, however, in an episode of his podcast The Anthropocene Reviewed, our loyalty to our lawns might be deeply misguided. In the United States alone, lawns cover a larger area than the state of Ohio, account for one-third of all residential water use (most of it drinking water), and require tremendous amounts of gasoline, deadly chemicals, money, and time for their upkeep. They do all this without providing useful crops or native plants for pollinators, reducing biodiversity and hastening climate change.
“In short,” Green concludes, “the U.S.’s most abundant and labor intensive crop is pure, unadulterated luxury.”
The scientific name for the common dandelion - taraxacum officinale - hints at a world where people saw dandelions differently.2 Taraxacum appears to be a latinization of their Arab name, and officinale comes from the Latin officina, meaning “workshop” or “pharmacy,” suggesting that these plants will be valuable for an apothecary.3
With that sense of dandelions, then, as something valued, I spent my week trying to understand the value of dandelions, in the present and in the past.
The Dandelion Has Been Recorded…
I started my background research, as I often do, with Wikipedia.
Wikipedia tells us breezily that dandelions “were well known to ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans, and are recorded to have been used in traditional Chinese medicine for over a thousand years.” It doesn’t provide a direct source, however, for this line.
Okay, I thought. Easy enough. I’ll track down those original sources; I’m sure my readers will love to see an Egyptian tomb engraving of a dandelion surrounded by hieroglyphics or whatever.
A quick Google of “dandelion Ancient Egypt” produced a lot of gardening websites and university botany departments repeating these mythological claims, but with no cited sources.
The Wildlife Trust for Lancashire, Manchester, and North Merseyside, for example, tells us that “Dandelions are recorded on clay tables [sic] in ancient Egypt and China, as herbal remedies dating back to 1500 BC.”
I breathed a sigh of relief when my search turned up a page from the National Library of Medicine, an official U.S. government website featuring an article penned by Ann Rothfeld, who has a PhD in history.
“Native to Asia and Europe,” Rothfeld writes, “the dandelion has been recorded in ancient writings, and Arabian physicians used the plant in medicine in the tenth and eleventh centuries.”
“Been recorded,” Ann? Where? WHERE?
I thought I hit the jackpot when I found a promisingly titled document, “Egyptian Herbal Monograph,” from the Egyptian government itself. No such luck - it’s just a document approving dandelion as an ingredient in contemporary herbal medicine, along with a list of common preparations.
Great, I thought. It’s the steel-corsets-to-WWI-battleships myth all over again.
Okay, let’s go deeper. I logged in to the University of Waterloo’s academic library, and searched “dandelion” and “Egypt” in several anthropology databases.
No results.
Google scholar? Just a bunch of modern botany articles.
Specialized Egyptology databases? After several minutes of searching through PDFs from Oxford’s Bodleian Library, I had one potential lead: an 1890 book, A Popular Account of the Ancient Egyptians, Vol. 2,” by John Gardner Wilkinson, often called the Father of Egyptology. In a table on page 34, he has a list of ancient words the writer Pliny used for plants, including “Aphace.” Pliny writes that it “flowers all the winter and spring, till the summer.” Wilkinson has noted, next to this quotation, “Dandelion.”
I checked this source, by the way, and found actual writings by Pliny! Excellent.
There’s just one problem: Pliny was an ancient Roman writer. So I had inadvertently proven that the dandelion shows up (in some form) in ancient Rome, but I had gotten no further with Egypt.
Without being able to spend months in the library or earning a graduate degree in Egyptology, I cannot confirm for sure that the ancient Egyptians did not write about dandelions. But if there is an actual record, it doesn’t seem to be on the internet.
What about ancient Greece?
When I googled “dandelions Greek mythology,” the first result was a blog post by “Trolley'd,” an…Australian mobile bar company? Always the first thing you want to see as a scholar.
In an October 3, 2020 blog post, an unknown author tells us that dandelions have “sunk their roots deep in history and are well-known in ancient Greek, Egyptian, Roman and Chinese cultures. In Greek mythology, Theseus ate dandelions for 30 days to fortify himself to fight the Minotaur, a half man-half bull that ate the young adults of Athens.”
This claim seemed promising in its specificity, so I searched “Theseus Minotaur dandelion.”
The results were…not as promising. There was an Arkansas brewery that named their 2022 dandelion mead “Theseus” in honor of the “dandelion eating, Minotaur slaying, ship rebuilding, King of Athens and Son of Poseidon!”
There was an herbal magic website that repeated the myth, as well as teaching us that dandelions are infused with Jupiter and good for November witch-craft.
And there was a witchy art Instagram, “Hecate’s Moonlight,” which informs us that “it is said that Hecate fed Theseus Dandelion for 30 days to give him enough strength to defeat the Minotaur in the Cretan Labyrinth.”4
At a certain point, this was all beginning to sound like an accusation from the board game Clue. “It was Hecate, with the dandelions, in the labyrinth.”
Finally, I found a website that mentioned a source for its story about Theseus, Hecate, and the dandelions: Larry W. Mitich’s 1989 article “The Intriguing World of Weeds,” for a journal entitled Weed Technology (heh). Mitich informs us that “According to legend, Theseus ate a dandelion salad after killing the Minotaur.”
After. AFTER? How did it go from a celebratory dandelion salad to a pre-Minotaur-killing, Popeye-style power-up?
It should be noted that at this point I had begun to laugh hysterically, much like a beleaguered lawn owner in a perpetual battle against weeds that just kept popping up from some mysterious root.
Mitich continues to tell us that “Romans ate the plant as did the Gauls and Celts when the Romans invaded the North. The Anglo-Saxon tribes of Britain and the Normans of France continued to use the plant as food and as medicine to control scurvy and as a diuretic; it was planted in the medicinal gardens of monasteries.”
And, joy of joys, Mitich provides a source for this entire paragraph: Claire Shaver Haughton’s 1978 book Green Immigrants: The Plants that Transformed America.
Haughton’s book, luckily, is available on the Internet Archive, so I quickly flipped to the entry for “Dandelion.” Bingo. Haughton, it would seem, is the most likely source for all the Theseus mentions floating around the internet. On pages 103-4, after telling us about dandelions’ popularity in China and Japan, she writes:
In the Mediterranean world the Greeks learned early to tenderize the leaves by bleaching, and ancient myths tell that Hecate, the goddess of earth, moon, and the underworld, honored Theseus with a salad of dandelion greens after he had slain the Minotaur.
In Rome, too, the dandelion was commonly used in salads and stewpots, and when the Roman legions invaded the Rhineland and Gault they rejoiced to find it growing there. In Britain, Caesar found that the Celts claimed the dandelion as truly their own, a source not only of food but also of a wine that they made by fermenting its golden flowers. Dandelion wine is the most highly regarded of England’s country wines to this day.
Haughton’s book is lovely, and includes a wealth of lore on everything from African Violets to Zinnia.
What does it not include, however, is a single scholarly source. Haughton does not seem to have written any other books either, nor was she an established scholar of botany. And, since FindAGrave informs us that she died in 1993, our investigation ends here.
Haha, I’m totally kidding, no, it doesn’t.
I used FindAGrave to establish that Haughton had a daughter who died in 2019, found the daughter’s obituary, searched for all four of her named children on social media, and found the Facebook profile for her youngest daughter. I then sent her a message asking if she knew anything about her grandmother’s manuscript, notes, or sources. I haven’t heard back yet, but I’m optimistic.5
With the trail temporarily gone cold for the ancient Greeks, I moved on to the final oft-cited mythology: China.
Fortunately for you and for me, I immediately found several Chinese traditional medicine sites claiming dandelions as their own, and one herbal website said dandelions were first recorded in writing in a Chinese medicinal reference called the Tang Materia Medica in 659 BCE. The Materia Medica contains fifty-four books, all in ancient Chinese, so we’re going to take their word for it.
After more than two hours of research to fact-check a single line about mythology, I was a little scared about my prospects for narrating the rest of the history of dandelions. Fortunately, around a thousand years ago, dandelions incontrovertibly entered the historical record.
The Arab physician Avicenna (Ibn Sina) lived from 980 to 1037 in Persia, and wrote more than a hundred books that were held in high regard in Western medical studies from the thirteenth to seventeenth centuries. Among them was a medical encyclopedia, “The Canon,” which includes a reference for dandelions! The 11th century translation into Latin gives us the scientific name for dandelions that we still use today, and Avicenna helpfully tells us that it can be used topically for “Abscess, Arthralgia, Deep Wound, Bone Wound, Dermatitis, Headache, Purulent ear infections, and Injury of the orbits.”
A few hundred years later, English medical treatises explain dandelions’ many uses. Here, history PhD Ann Rothfeld was much better about citing her sources.
Sixteenth century physician and herbalist William Langham writes, in Garden of Health (1597), “The [dandelion] juice often applied, layeth downe the staring of the haire of the eyebrows, and causeth newe haired to grow.”
John Gerard, in 1630’s The Herball, says that, “Boiled, it strengthens the weake stomach, and eaten raw it stops the bellie and helps the Dysentery, especially being boyled with Lentils; the juice drunk is good against the involuntary effusion of seed; boyled in vinegar, it is good against the paine that troubles some in making of water [urinating].”
The language changes over the next four hundred years, but the basic claims stay the same.
I have a 1986 Reader’s Digest book, Magic and Medicine of Plants, which lists traditional uses for wild plants. Dandelions, it informs us, are packed with vitamins A and C, can be made into wine or tonics, and can be used as a diuretic, a laxative, and a treatment for liver ailments (159). While Reader’s Digest doesn’t mention anything about premature ejaculation, it does also suggest that the blossoms can be used as a natural dye.
It’s no Minotaur-slaying potion, but it’ll do.
Experiments in Loving the Dandelion
Faced with the distressing limits of the historical record, I decided the best tactic to follow this week was to experience dandelions personally. I’ve made salad with dandelion greens in the past, and found them to be a bitter and less appetizing version of arugula, so I turned my attention to the weird and wonderful world of dandelion beverages.
On the r/soda subreddit, I discovered that there’s an old-school British soda called “Dandelion & Burdock” made from the plants’ roots - the British answer to American root beer. I checked six different local stores with no luck, however, and Taylor and I agreed that driving forty minutes in each direction to the nearest British specialty store on a week night might be taking things a bit too far.
At the beloved specialty grocer Vincenzo’s, however, I found the next best thing: a peppermint and dandelion “Healtea,” the twenty-first century answer to John Gerard’s goodly cure-all.
We decided to film ourselves drinking it, which you can watch below, if you’re interested.
The general consensus? It was…fine.
Most dandelion concoctions, much like the one we tried, contain far less dandelion than you’d otherwise think. Dandelion “honey” is just simple syrup with dandelion flowers in it. Dandelion wine contains dandelion flowers, but it also contains raisins, lemon juice, and sugar, which are doing a lot of the heavy lifting.6
I will give credit where credit is due, however: for all their dubious historical claims, that Australian mobile bar Trolley’d also serves a seriously dandelion-heavy cocktail. The “Spirit of the Dandelion” contains nine ingredients, seven of which are dandelion derivatives: dandelion flower-infused white rye, white vermouth, dandelion flower syrup, lemon juice, roasted dandelion root tea, dandelion & burdock bitters, roasted dandelion root foam, crystallized dandelion leaf, and fresh dandelion flowers.
By any metric, that’s just an absolutely wild number of distinct dandelion components.
I had better luck using dandelion as a dye. On Tuesday evening I bought white cotton yarn and aluminum sulfate to use as a mordant, then I spent a half an hour or so at twilight picking dandelion flowers from the grass surrounding my apartment building.
“Are you doing that officially or unofficially?” asked one elderly lady, eyeing my sundress and paper bag with concern. “Unofficially!” I grinned back. “I’m turning them into yellow dye.”
“Ah,” she said. “Good luck with that.”
Back in my kitchen, I simmered my yarn with the mordant, then boiled the flowers in water for an hour, then filtered them out and soaked the yarn in the resulting deep yellow liquid for twenty-four hours. After soaking and drying, the result is a hank of faded, butter-yellow yarn that I have dubbed “forbidden noodles.”
I really enjoyed the natural dyeing experiment, but I was disappointed by the resulting color: a ghost of dandelions’ vivid yellow glow.
My quest to recreate that color, however, reminded me of this video I found a few months ago by a girl with a very specific obsession: Crayola’s defunct “Dandelion” crayon, which was permanently retired in 2017.
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The video creator, LaKenzie, acknowledges it’s a weird collection, but “this collection makes me happy,” she concludes. “And if you wanna make fun of someone for doing something that makes them happy, then I think you’re the one with a problem.”
In sentiment if not in focus, LaKenzie’s kindred spirit is Alan Russo: the founder - and as far as I can tell, sole member - of The Dandelion Appreciation Society. On the Society’s brightly colored website, a visitor quickly learns that “We here at The Dandelion Appreciation Society love Dandelions. We feel the Dandelion has gotten a really bad rap and has somehow become the quintessential scapegoat for all that is considered to be a ‘weed’ in the world of the sterile toxic green lawn. We are here to help educate to the contrary. Dandelions are one of the most beautiful and useful plants on the planet!”
“This site is in a state of constant change,” Russo warns us, in a pinned post dated January 29, 2011. Across the top are tabs for information about the botany and taxonomy of dandelions, folklore and history, recipes, and more.7 On every page, almost all of the posts are by Alan.
A lifetime membership in the Dandelion Appreciation Society comes with a framed certificate and a “I love Dandelions” bumper sticker - an incredible value at only $10. For $13 more, Alan will throw in this Wild Edible and Medicinal Plants Interactive computer CD.
I fear it may sound like I am making fun of Alan and the Dandelion Appreciation Society, but I want to make one thing clear: I would die for Alan.
How could you make fun of someone who loves something so purely, so deeply, and with such wholehearted sincerity?
The Dandelion Appreciation Society’s website has a dedicated page for poetry by members. There is one poem posted. It is, of course, by Alan.
Dandelion, Dandelion
It’s not fair what they do
They spray and they dig
To eradicate you
Your beauty and elegance
Is not to compare
The things that they do
It just isn’t fair
I only wish people
Would open their eyes
To all of the good
That you have inside
You're food and you're medicine
You’re all that we need
You even play with the children
When you go to seed
I can’t thank you enough
For all that you do
I can’t believe what they do
To eradicate you
The Dandelion in the Spring
This week, I learned about lawns and crayons and medieval medicine, drank tonic and brewed dye, and dabbled in affectionate obsession. As I write the final words of this essay, however, I must admit that while I don’t see dandelions as the scourge of civilization, nor do I yet share Alan Russo’s ardor.
That half of this newsletter is dedicated to a rabbit hole of historical research speaks to the fact that I am far more interested in what dandelions mean to people than I am in the plants themselves.
Though I couldn’t find a reliable source for most of those mythological claims, their appeal is irresistible. To believe that dandelions were touched by Hecate and aided in slaying the Minotaur is to believe that even the most common and ordinary thing can be tinged with magic.
For the father wearing the dandelion flower crown on the path that day, dandelions are the tiny, careful fingers of his children, and their celebration of the limitless beauty all around them.
And for me? When I see dandelions these days, I think of The Hunger Games trilogy (spoilers ahead).
When Katniss Everdeen is eleven years old, her father is killed in a mining accident, and she, her mother, and her sister almost starve to death that winter. The baker’s son, Peeta Mellark, risks a beating to give her two loaves of bread that save her family’s life. The next day, she spots the first dandelions of the season, “and I knew how we were going to survive” (32).
Years later, Katniss and Peeta survive the Hunger Games, are involuntarily drafted into a bloody revolution, and experience staggering trauma and devastating loss. At the end of the trilogy, Katniss chooses love and life with Peeta, because “what I need to survive…is the dandelion in the spring. The bright yellow that means rebirth instead of destruction. The promise that life can go on, no matter how bad our losses. That it can be good again” (388).
Though we may hope to avoid the horrors Katniss experiences, we cannot escape the fact that we live in a world deeply wounded by ecological devastation and ruptured by cycles of senseless violence.
If we are to survive that which lies ahead, we must trade the luxury and waste of the lawn for the cheerful persistence and adaptability of the dandelion: the unassuming weed whose yearly appearance heralds the longed for return of spring, and with it the relentless audacity of hope.
When it comes to dandelions, what should I add to my syllabus?
I want to hear from you, whether it’s in the comments on this post or in emails to me directly at roschmansyllabus@substack.com!
A search for the origins of wishing on dandelions returned no conclusive results.
By some estimations, there are more than 2000 species of dandelions, including beautiful ornamental dandelions in Japan. The ones that have spread across North America and much of Eurasia, however, are taraxacum officinale - the common dandelion.
Botanists who specialize in studying dandelions are sometimes called taraxacologists
“It is said,” again. Said by WHOM?
The other half of that particular episode of The Anthropocene Reviewed about lawns, by the way, is about googling strangers: something both John Green and I excel at.
It also takes almost two years to make, so that was right out.
I know what you’re thinking - maybe Alan knows the source on those Greek mythology claims. That’s how I found this page in the first place, looking for clues. While the rest of the tabs are filled in, Folklore/History is tauntingly blank. “there’s nothing here…why not?” Anonymous asks in 2013. “Waiting for members to write something,” Alan replies. Me too, Alan. Me too
I was waiting for the bus a few days back at one of those weird bus stops that's just a pole stuck in someone's front yard, and there was a whole colony of dandelions that had puffed up into their seeded form. As I kicked at them to make the seeds disperse (a childhood habit I will never not indulge), I was struck thinking about what a neat little evolutionary trick those seeds are. A gust of wind or a car whooshing past or someone like me sending them off to take over the next lawn. I think dandelions are sort of a triumph in that way, a plant so effortlessly adapted to the environments we've created. Maybe that's why we hate them so much, a jealousy of their ease of survival and proliferation.
I've been looking up things on dandelions and thoroughly enjoyed your post. I am currently living in a place that does have dandelions - but only in the busy city areas, where I'm sure they're sprayed. I think perhaps I'll try growing some in a pot of soil. We'll see. I was also pleasantly surprised to see Ibn Sina, as the Wikipedia for dandelions only mentioned his name. I wonder if I could find a copy of his book....