1,001 Ways to Repurpose Those 1,001 Dandelions on Your Sidewalk: Taraxacum officinale

I’ve got a good one for you guys, a joke I’ll give to you — for free! — to use as we get back into hosting and habiting friendly gatherings. Ready?

April showers bring May flowers and what did the Mayflower bring...?

                                                                                                                                                         Dandelions!

Historical rumor is that this twist on the classic childhood zinger holds true. It is thought dandelions (Taraxacum officinale) first came to North America in 1620 as passengers aboard the Mayflower, providing vital vitamins and minerals for the pilgrim settlers [1] once the plants took root in the ‘New’ World. It wouldn’t be hard to squeeze dandelions onto the menu of your next Thanksgiving meal now, either; the dandelion is edible from flower to root, bearing leaves of a “slightly astringent flavor prized by salad eaters, Canada geese, and porcupines” [2], alike. Among just a few of the recipes offered to The New York Times Cooking subscribers: a “generous bunch of dandelion greens,” alongside onion, mushrooms, garlic cloves, and Gruyère for a delicious tart; a dandelion salad with beets, bacon, and goat cheese toasts; dandelions puréed with fava beans; and one that particularly caught my eye, “Southern” Dandelion Greens with Crispy Onions. The flowers are said to be delicious fried in batter, the greens taste best blanched (to remove bitterness) or sautéed like a spinach or a kale.

Dandelions are not only eaten but also imbibed. Since the Middle Ages, the Brits have been drinking Dandelion and Burdock, originally a lite mead, but now a carbonated “whizzy fizzer” tasting of root beer and licorice, for sale across the British Isles. When the roots are roasted and then steeped, they may also serve as a coffee substitute [3], and dandelion tea is purported to treat, among other things, indigestion, heartburn, and high blood pressure, all while supporting liver and kidney health. (For my attempt at dandelion tea, as well as some tips for your own ‘home brew,’ check out the image, at right).

Dandelions also became quite popular during America’s Prohibition era, so popular in fact that a report from Detroit in 1923, nestled among other notices in The New York Times, remarked on the city’s need for more garbage men just to handle all the dandelion mash being thrown away on nearly every city block. In 1919, proactive American soldiers in Germany picked up recipes for loewenzahnwein (dandelion wine) in anticipation of “difficulty in obtaining any sort of liquid refreshment of a cheering nature when they reach[ed] home” [see this article in my collection of NYT dandelion pieces, The Daily Dandelion, below]. No longer restricted to home brewing and speakeasies today, dandelion wines continue to delight.

There are truly enough dandelion articles in the New York Times for their own publication! Here's just a sampling. Note the year listed for each piece.

From the nineteen-teens, to the 20s, and 80s, dandelions pop up like, well, weeds across the trends and periods of American history. During the Great Depression, dandelion meals supported many struggling people, including the majority of families interviewed across Manhattan’s Bellevue district on the East Side, where dandelions were “cheap and plentiful” [4]. On Father’s Day in 1931 (a holiday relatively unknown at the time), the Gray Lady named the dandelion the must-have flower for American dads with the following ‘relatable’ message: “the more it is trampled on, the better it grows” [5]. (Yikes!) The 1950s saw Ray Bradbury publish both Fahrenheit 451 and his nostalgic ode to the American summer, Dandelion Wine. (The latter a work that would make its way to the moon in 1971, when Apollo 15’s astronauts named “Dandelion Crater” after the book). Scientists (earthbound, this time) also attempted to make the ever-present cigarette smoke of the Swinging Sixties a bit more palatable — and nicotine-free — with a blend made of “petunia, cabbage, and dandelion leaves [...] sprayed with sugar, cocoa, maple, and [...] Jamaica rum” [6], released in 1963.

With all of these uses for the dandelion, what’s not to like?

According to some in the suburbs...well, everything, apparently. “Most people,” one article notes, “who hold to a Calvinist notion that a weed-free lawn is a necessary way to grace, look on the dandelion as a weed to be sternly cast out,” after all [2]. The dandelion is as classic a lawn pest as the garden gnome a lawn ornament. With a taproot typically 6-18 inches (and some as long as 15 feet! [7]), wresting a dandelion from the soil proves a Herculean task, made especially so by the plant’s powers of regeneration. When wounded by a garden spade or left shorn in a lawnmower’s wake, dandelion roots return as a hydra with a vengeance; one broken root can produce 2-5 new shoots, each of which are destined to produce proportionately more leaves and seeds than their fallen predecessors [3, 7]. The dandelion’s leaves are among the first greens to pop up in late winter or early spring, and the plants require only short-day light (12 hours or less of sunlight) to form flower buds [1], the reason gardeners may look out to find new flowers blooming from spring through the fall. The germination period for the seeds is also short (7 to 21 days), and once flower buds appear, each stalk needs only 48 hours to elongate and rear its ‘ugly’ head above the leaves, optimal sunlight for the plant—and optimal viewing for the block’s busybodies. Its final insult to injury? The plants produce ethylene gas, poisoning surrounding neighbors to minimize competition. Why keep up with the Joneses when you can just kill them off, right?

I enjoyed uncovering the perennial (word choice intended) dandelion debate across the literal hundreds of articles I skimmed of New York’s news and opinion columns before I cut myself off from reading more. From the opposition each year: hatred of the allergen-bearing, irrepressible eyesores and gardener’s foe. And the proponents: admiration of the plant’s pluck and whimsy, of its ability to carry childhood memories of barefoot summers alongside its seeds as they float, effortlessly, along the current of a warm wind (“for a childhood in which dandelions had no part is a defective experience” [8]). It might surprise no one that I fall in the latter camp.

I remember dandelions at my feet as my family laid out on the lawn of Detroit’s Greenfield Village one Fourth of July, fireflies preceding the fireworks as the sun disappeared and the stage was set for “Stars and Stripes Forever.” (When my feelings toward America were as simple as the Red White & Blue (strawberry, Cool Whip, and blueberry) dessert I looked forward to each year.) There were other dandelions across my family’s summer sojourns to Michigan, where we went each year: watching the seeds fly over the lawn and into the water at Hamlin Lake, where my dad spent his vacations as a boy; leaping over their leaves as my cousins and I raced around the house at Ambridge Ct, playing Capture the Flag — their grass was so much softer (and cold on my feet!) than the drought-resistant, crunchy blades of Texas lawns. I remember the small trickle of water (or “stream,” to a third grader’s eyes) that my friend and I liked to walk along during recess, where we scouted for prime fairy house construction sites, among the stones, dandelions, and clovers behind the temporary buildings, the school being under construction itself for most of my elementary school career. I wrote letters to those fairies back then, asking them how they were, what they wore (I imagined flower petals), and whether they had any pets. And they (my mom) answered back! Their handwriting was small, neat, and playful, floral flourishes ending many of the words, and pixie dust fell from each page as I went to show my parents what Aurora and her friends had told me.

Dandelion Wine, mentioned above, saw its characters bottle the kinds of memories that dandelions call to mind for so many; each day of the summer, they pressed and bottled dandelions into a new bottle of wine, each bottle representing the memories of each summer day (or at least that’s what SparkNotes says...). “A common flower, a weed that no one sees, yes.” But for the characters of Dandelion Wine — and for me — "a noble thing, the dandelion” [9]. In Victorian bouquets, the flowers stood for joy and happiness, after all [10]...and for making wishes.

Wishes.

Perhaps the biggest wish of the past year, if a “wish” can even be used on something so serious, was a beginning to the end of this pandemic. It’s a miracle — of modern medicine and science — that it’s coming our way. My vaccines came over two Thursday evenings, one in April, one May, at York College in Queens, where over 100,000 New Yorkers have gotten inoculated thus far. I felt positively effervescent getting to be one of them, walking into the stadium where the vaccinations were taking place, saying thank you probably too loudly and smiling for too long at the National Guardsmen and women working the site (during 13-hour shifts, as I learned while waiting). I watched the city-made PSA with glee, grinning behind my mask as the animated characters gave and repeated (and then...repeated) their messages before it was my turn for my first dose. I felt wrapped up in history among the others there, inscribing the details onto my memories of the experience for future retellings: the woman in front of me in line who wore a bedazzled, celebratory, and vaccine-emblazoned shirt that I wanted to compliment her on before she disappeared, the guardsman on break who looked so young as he filled out his crossword puzzle, languidly, in a chair at the door. I’d stood up, first shot complete, saying something genuine but uninspired about how ‘I’d never been this excited to get a vaccine before!’ to my inoculator, as he smiled and looked past me, readying for the next arm and the arm after that. The air really did feel different when I stepped outside; it felt hopeful.

I’d crossed the street next and headed to a large field by the side of the parking lot. The grass expanse was huge, dandelion-covered, and seemingly purposeless, a wide-open space unusual for a large city block. The providence of the vaccine and what it suggested for the days to come had settled into this grass, and I felt its promises under my feet as I walked the field’s perimeter, kicking up dandelion seeds with almost every step. The dandelions here, so commonplace and so inevitable, started me thinking about this spring, and the last one — how different already they have been — this summer, and the last one, then next spring, next summer...The dandelions had been here across all of those seasons and will be for the next. And us, too.

I’d learn later that, while most dandelion seeds land within 2 yards of their starting point, others regularly travel as far as 20 miles — even 90 miles! — from home [11]. As I sat against a tree in the field before heading back to my apartment, I wondered how far back the dandelion lineages here stretched. From before York College, surely. From before the very first vaccine? I wouldn’t be surprised. How long has this little community been floating seeds in the wind, idly, back and forth? And from how far away, from what corners of the other boroughs and beyond, have other seeds traveled to end up here? Where will the next seeds go?

This will sound like a literary set-up (and a heavy-handed one at that), but I discovered a surprising connection to history in that field, alongside the dandelions. In the northwest corner, near a collection of discarded file cabinets and overgrown grass, a wire fence door stands slightly ajar, a small forest behind it, shaded, a floor of tangled ivy underneath—and among the trees, a few gravestones. I had quite a difficult time finding what this was online (and I didn’t feel it’d be respectful to take a closer look myself in-person): who were these people and what was their story? Across the street lies Prospect Cemetery, the oldest in Queens, 4 acres, and founded in 1688. There, Revolutionary War soldiers and members of prominent families (Van Wycks, Sutphins, and Brinkerhoffs) from some of the city’s earliest days rest [12]. That cemetery had become overgrown too, a multimillion-dollar restoration campaign completed in 2014 to reveal “the grounds of Prospect Cemetery for the first time in decades” [12]. But that campaign hadn’t seemed to have reached this little corner, the “mystery” cemetery adjacent to the parking lot [13]. I’ll say, from hesitant knowledge collected across a series of Googles, that it appears this spot dates back to the mid-1800s, when the lot was donated to the First United Methodist Church of Jamaica by two other prominent Queens families, the Leeches and the Snedekers. An image of one of its stones, grainy, in an article in The Queens Chronicle [13], reads ‘Abraham Leech,’ a bookkeeper, involved Jamaica citizen, and friend to Walt Whitman. How amazing it is to find him out there, amongst the dandelions: Hello. To end with his friend:

Simple and fresh and fair from winter's close emerging,
As if no artifice of fashion, business, politics, had ever been,
Forth from its sunny nook of shelter'd grass—innocent, golden,
calm as the dawn,
The spring's first dandelion shows its trustful face.

Walt Whitman, "The First Dandelion"

Perhaps we have permission to start trusting again, that things will cycle onward, as surely as the dandelions will come in.

---

Cited Sources

[1] Warmund, M. (2019, March 27). The Lowly Dandelion. [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://ipm.missouri.edu/MEG/2019/3/dandelion/ 
[2] Unbylined. (1982, May 18). In Defense of the Dandelion. The New York Times Archives. https://timesmachine.nytimes.com    
[3] Taft, D. (2014, May 30). Dandelion: A Tenacious Beauty. The New York Times. https://nytimes.com  
[4] Wiehl, D. G. (1933). Diets of Low-Income Families in New York City. The Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly Bulletin 11(4): 308-324.
[5] Unbylined. (1931, June 21). Today is Father’s Day. Symbolized by the Dandelion, Which Thrives on Abuse. The New York Times Archives. https://timesmachine.nytimes.com    
[6] Osmundsen, J. A. (1963, August 18). Scientists Work on Safe Smoking. The New York Times Archives. https://timesmachine.nytimes.com
[7] Ray, C. C. (2016, May 9). Fighting Dandelions From the Top Down: Does It Work? The New York Times. https://nytimes.com
[8] Roe, E. P. (1889) The Home Acre, Public Domain: here.
[9] Bradbury, R. (1957). Dandelion Wine. New York: Doubleday.
[10] Dietz, S. T. (2020). The Complete Language of Flowers: A Definitive and Illustrated History. New York: Wellfleet Press.
[11] Cummins, C., Seale, M., Macente, A., Certini, D., Mastropaolo, E., Viola, I. M., Nakayama, N. (2018). A separated vortex ring underlies the flight of the dandelion. Nature 565: 414-418.
[12] Prospect Cemetery Association. (2017). Cemetery History. Prospect Cemetery Association. Retrieved from https://prospectcemeteryassociation.org/cemetery 
[13] Banduci, L. (2001, August 16). Mystery Cemetery Cleanup Has People Puzzled in Jamaica. Queens Chronicle. https://www.qchron.com 
[14] Day, L. (2007). Field Guide to the Natural World of New York City. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Additional Resources and Interesting Reads

On Thomas Bayrle
Schwendener, M. (2018, June 21). This Artist Foresaw Our Digital Future in a Meadow of Dandelions. The New York Times. https://nytimes.com

On Child Rearing: Is your kid a dandelion? Are you?
Schiffman, R. (2020, August 6). Is Your Child an Orchid, a Tulip or a Dandelion? The New York Times. https://nytimes.com

On Dandelion Vortexes
Uncover the mystery of the dandelion's flight by revisiting Source # 11, in Nature!
Or through PBS: Wu, K. J. (2019, July 2). The uplifting science of how dandelion seeds stay aloft. [Blog post] Retrieved from https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/dandelion-seed-flight/

Image Credit
Taraxacum officinale Fast Facts Photo: Yokaona on Dribbble
Planted Header image: Utsman Media on Unsplash
Thomas Bayrle portrait: Artist profile, Tate Modern
Thomas Bayrle, "Perspective" art works: Bryan Thomas with the The New York Times
Vaccination poster: York College
Taraxacum officinale Map Photo: William Curtis, Smithsonian Archives
Dandelion Fountain: Paolo Esse

All other images are my own.