Tooth of the lion

It is dandelion season. They cluster along the edges of roadsides and take over patches of waste ground. They push up from cracks in the pavement and squat in gutters. While the daffodils are withered and brown and the white dead nettle too subtle to compete, it is the dandelions, with their extrovert yellow, that steal the glory.

It was in the 1500s that they became associated with the lion, their jagged leaves giving them the name of lion’s tooth, or dent-de-lion. But their rich colour is also reminiscent of the sun, ruler of Leo, the astrological lion. Today, they have lost any regal associations and are seen as nothing but a weed, inconvenient or despised, depending on your point of view. Yet a field of dandelions is easily as beautiful as one of more well-regarded wildflowers.

When you live in a town, you find the wild where you can. Not just in the obvious parks and squares, but in the edges, the forgotten corners and in the overlooked plants. Since lockdown, when the weeds were given free rein to grow where they might, there seem to be more of them. Weeds have always found enterprising spaces, but they have had a little freedom and are taking advantage of it.

I delight in the dandelions’ beauty in the urban wild, but in the yard, I give them no mercy, pulling them from pots to allow other flowers to flourish. As anyone knows who has tried to dislodge a dandelion, they cling to the soil with a lion’s strength. And they are resilient. Only a few days after the grass mower in the park destroys any flower that has dared to grow, dandelions appear again, pushing up through the grass clippings. They will be with us all through the summer, when we’re distracted by other blooms, and through the turn of another season into autumn, reminding us that beauty is always there in the humblest package.

They remind us too, that nature is forever transforming itself. It isn’t long before the patches of yellow re-emerge as delicate globes, filagrees of seeds ready to be swept away by wind or breath. These spheres are much less robust than the flowers that came before them, those tiny seeds bearing no resemblance to what they will become. But that is the point. Their purpose is to travel: to float and to dance on the whim of the breeze, before finally coming to rest, perhaps far from where they began. The dandelion shifts from form to form effortlessly. As we move into the height of spring, we could learn from its bold journey of renewal.