Editorial 1.6, June 1999, by Deirdre Helfferich S.O.D.! The Ruralite recently featured an article on a dreaded alien menace to the pristine wilderness that is Denali National Park; a sawtoothed sneak of tenacious temperament and deceptively innocuous appearance: the dandelion. Fortunately for visitors to the park, a volunteer brigade of heroic uprooters is coming to the rescue, brandishing their digging tools at the heartless and opportunistic weeds attempting to steal the roadside dirt from the innocent native botanicals. Hooray! Or at least, that’s how the author of the article portrayed the situation. Myself, I see it a little differently. Dandelions are a brave and hardy pioneering lot, their sunny faces cheerful all summer long, even when they’ve gone gray and long of tooth. They grow anywhere the soil has been disturbed, they are tough and don’t like cosseting, and their entire beings are happily useful to human beings: their leaves are full of vitamins C and A as well as calcium, are used as bitters for the digestion or blanched and used as salad greens every bit as tasty as endive or radicchio (and don’t cost nearly as much); their roots break up hard clay pan and can be roasted and ground and used like coffee; and the flowers can be battered and fried or, of course, made into dandelion wine, cordial, or stout. When the flower has gone to seed, you can make a wish and with one puff, spread a little happiness throughout your neighborhood. That’s quite a package for one unassuming little plant. But the dandelion has many enemies, as do all those who attempt to do good in the world. Evil forces have been joining together to do it harm: a long and tireless campaign has been waged until even people you would think would know better have been swept up by the national tide of misinformation and prejudice. Those behind this campaign would have you believe that dandelions are European invaders that wrest habitat away from locals, destroy the purity of the wilderness, and generally muscle their way into places where they don’t belong, like some gang of yellow-faced green-necked thugs in leafy skirts. Well, guess what? These people have lawns. Or, if they don’t have one now, it’s a safe bet that they want one. Lawns may harken back to the days when we all lived on the savannah, but even there one finds a tremendous variety of plants. The obsession with monoculture has caused great ecological disruption, making lawns along with other crops (corn, wheat, you name it) far more susceptible to damage from the effects of drought, flood, and disease. The great prairies of the Lower 48 are dim memories, with only patches surviving here and there. Now great fields of a single variety of a single plant stretch where a complex ecosystem once grew. The new and improved fields provide an excellent place for pests and diseases to flourish, necessitating tons of pesticides to poison them (and the occasional incautious mammal). And guess what else? While it is true that French colonists brought le dent-de-lion (also known as piss-en-lit) with them, back a couple of hundred years ago, and that they did escape the confines of colonial gardens and become feral throughout the continent, it is not true that dandelions were not here already. A botanist friend of mine spent much time in Lake Clark National Park, for example, studying a rare alpine dandelion that is faintly pink. Many species of dandelions may be found throughout Alaska. The colonists only brought one species. My concern is that these do-gooder dandelion killers may be wiping out native species in their frenzy to eradicate what they perceive to be a menace. Perhaps they should simply close the park roads and revegetate them. That would take care of the problem. In a few years, the roads would grow over, eventually the dandelions would be crowded out, and after a hundred years or so, you would only see a faint scar on the tundra. Keeping the roads open and the traffic rolling ensures that seeds from everywhere will keep being introduced, and that dandelions, vetch, fireweed, and other colonizing plants will spring up, despite the best efforts of the weed squads. But I suspect that rescuing the fragile tundra from corruption is not the only motive here. I suspect that deep in their heart of hearts, the dandelion diggers harbor a nasty resentment toward this invader of lawns, and overlook the fact that dandelions are the first step toward turning a lawn (or asphalt) back into a meadow, that bastion of sunny wilderness where diversity and a profusion of life run rampant. This is a plant that deserves our respect, not our enmity. Save Our Dandelions! | ||
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