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Taraxacum of The Family Asteraceae. The Name Comes From The French For Lion's Tooth

The document summarizes the debate between a man and his neighbor over whether dandelions are weeds or flowers. The man enjoys dandelions in his yard and finds them useful, while his neighbor sees them only as weeds and tries to eliminate them. The man argues that dandelions have been around for millions of years, provide benefits like food and honey, and are resilient plants that humans have deemed weeds only because they are common. He declares dandelions to be flowers and is proud to have them in his yard.

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Paola Antonieta Izurieta
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99 views1 page

Taraxacum of The Family Asteraceae. The Name Comes From The French For Lion's Tooth

The document summarizes the debate between a man and his neighbor over whether dandelions are weeds or flowers. The man enjoys dandelions in his yard and finds them useful, while his neighbor sees them only as weeds and tries to eliminate them. The man argues that dandelions have been around for millions of years, provide benefits like food and honey, and are resilient plants that humans have deemed weeds only because they are common. He declares dandelions to be flowers and is proud to have them in his yard.

Uploaded by

Paola Antonieta Izurieta
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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MR. WASHINGTON WAS A HARD-CORE LAWN freak.

His yard and my yard


blended together in an ambiguous fashion. Every year he was seized by a kind of
herbicidal mania. He started fondling his weed-eater and mixing up vile potions in vats in
his garage. It usually added up to trouble.
Sure enough, one morning I caught him over in my yard spraying dandelions.
"Didn't really think you'd mind,'' says he, righteously.
"Mind, mind!—you just killed my flowers," says I, with guarded contempt.
"Flowers?" he ripostes. "Those are weeds!" He points at my dandelions with utter
disdain.
"Weeds," says I, "are plants growing where people don't want them. In other
words," says I, "weeds are in the eye of the beholder. And as far as I am concerned,
dandelions are not weeds—they are flowers!"
“Horse manure,'' says he, and stomps off home to avoid any taint of lunacy. [pg.
63 ROBERT FULGHUM]
Now I happen to like dandelions a lot. They cover my yard each spring with fine
yellow flowers, with no help from me at all. They mind their business and I mind mine.
The young leaves make a spicy salad. The flowers add fine flavor and elegant color to a
classic light wine. Toast the roots, grind and brew, and you have a palatable coffee. The
tenderest shoots make a tonic tea. The dried mature leaves are high in iron, vitamins A
and C, and make a good laxative. Bees favor dandelions, and the cooperative result is
high-class honey.
Dandelions have been around for about thirty million years; there are fossils. The
nearest relatives are lettuce and chicory. Formally classed as perennial herbs of the genus
Taraxacum of the family asteraceae. The name comes from the French for lion's tooth,
dent de lion. Distributed all over Europe, Asia, and North America, they got there on
their own. Resistant to disease, bugs, heat, cold, wind, rain, and human beings.
If dandelions were rare and fragile, people would knock themselves out to pay
$14.95 a plant, raise them by hand in greenhouses, and form dandelion societies and all
that. But they are everywhere and don't need us and kind of do what they please. So we
call them “weeds,” and murder them at every opportunity.
Well, I say they are flowers, and pretty fine flowers at that. And I am honored to
have [pg. 66 ALL I REALLY NEED TO KNOW…] them in my yard, where I want
them. Besides, in addition to every other good thing about them, they are magic. When
the flower turns to seed, you can blow them off the stem, and if you blow just right and
all those little helicopters fly away, you get your wish. Magic. Or if you are a lover, they
twine nicely into a wreath for your friend's hair.
I defy my neighbor to show me anything in his yard that compares with
dandelions.
And if all that isn't enough, consider this: Dandelions are free. Nobody ever
complains about your picking them. You can have all you can carry away. Some weed!

Originally published in All I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, Robert L.


Fulgum (New York: Random House Publishing Group: 2003), pp. 65–67. Reformatted
by BYU-Idaho for accessibility purposes, 3 October 2014.

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