You can cut it down with your lawn mower, drive over it growing in a crack of your cement driveway, and it will survive! It has spread to every continent but Antarctica. It flowers low, then rises to spread its parachute seeds. It has been used for food, for tonic, for wine; so it is both blessed and cursed. Children have made it into chain necklaces, and made bouquets, and blown the many parachutes to watch them fly!

It is a whole bouquet, a composite flower. The outer ray flowers, which look like petals, are actually five petals fused together; and the packed short disc flowers in the center are each a complete flower with stamen and pistil. Its roots penetrate the soil deeply and can survive drought, and it is very hard to cut the root deep enough so it will not once more grow!

Its bitter taste keeps grazing animals from eating it. It is believed to be one of the "bitter herbs" mentioned in the Bible. It can be cooked and eaten; from the roots a laxative can be made; and it has also been dried for a Postum-like drink. Its gold in the spring flowering can be beautiful and add brightness to the day. And we might as well enjoy it, for we are stuck with it! What is it? --- The common Dandelion (Taraxacum officinale).

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Dandelions

The dandelion is an ubiquitous member of the sunflower family, for there are few places where it is not to be found. The mechanisms for survival which have been provided for it through centuries of evolution make it a plant capable of sampling many varied environments. Along the edge of highways, it occurs everywhere except in the driest deserts. It has been found at the edge of tundra country, and along the trails in deep forests. In carefully mowed lawns, its growth is an appressed collection of leaves which hug the ground successfully against the onslaught of the lawn mower. In deep grassy meadows, it will send its leaves at an angle upward for half a foot or more, and the flowerheads to well over a foot.
Each leaf of the dandelion is folded along its middle. Since there is no stem, the leaves arise from a root top. When even light rains fall, each leaf will serve as a trough to direct water toward the central columned taproot. A score of leaves will radiate out from a center, and no leaf shades another more than the barest minimum from the sun, so as not to interfere with the photosynthetic process of building more tissue.
In the early spring, the buds will be forming in the center of the mass of radial leaves, and when conditions are right and the bud is ready for opening, the bud, which seemed to have practically no stalk, is now lifted high into the air. Strangely enough, in well-clipped lawns, this may be only three or four inches, but in deep grass meadows and along weedy trails it may reach to over a foot. Here, high in the air, it is favored by visits from insects which aid in the pollenation, and at the elevated position winds readily pick up the pollen to blow it by chance to other flowers.
After the flower has completed its blooming, the bracts around its base fold forward and enclose the flower parts in a tight mass; the stem shrinks and droops so that the flower with its fertile seeds awaiting ripening is safe closer to the ground. After a few days, the seed heads are ripened, and the stalk is raised again. The cells in the stalk greatly elongate, raising the ripened seed head considerably higher than it was when in flower. Slowly the tightly closed heads, now with ripened seeds, open and the hundreds of elongated seeds, which had been tightly appressed by their bases, are now exposed on the base, which assumes a hemispherical shape, and so each seed projects at right angles to the surface of this base at its point of attachment. On the top of each seed is a short slender stem, on the top of which is a group of fine projections which spread out like the ribs of an umbrella. At this time, the slightest breeze might pick up some of these seeds with their little umbrella parachutes, and carry them great distances to insure future generations.
The tap root has been found to penetrate sometimes for many feet into the ground, where moisture is extracted by numerous tiny thread-like roots which project from the main stem. Such a deep taproot gathers moisture from the depths, enabling the plant to survive long periods of drought.
This plant has a great defense against the efforts to eliminate it from lawns with a knife blade. If the head is severed from the taproot near where it sent out its leaves, a new top will likely be developed, which will be multiple-headed and more vigorous than ever.
-- by Stanley B. Mulaik

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