A lesson learned from a bouquet of dandelions, and its journey from Rome to Paris.
If you draw a straight line between my childhood home and Rome, and repeat the exercise in the opposite direction toward Paris, you’ll discover I grew up perfectly equidistant from both.
My elementary school was only a block away from my house. On Rome avenue. So I would typically lunch at home. One early afternoon, I found myself on Paris avenue, also precisely one block away from home, in the other direction, struggling to keep the lunch I had downed only minutes before from resurfacing.
You see, I had resolved to bring my elementary school teacher a bouquet of dandelions freshly picked from my backyard — and had just been summarily laughed right out of the schoolyard.
Caught between fighting the powerful manicured-lawn lobby of middle-class suburbia and unsuccessfully striving to yank that unfortunate “bedwetter” moniker hanging from its stem, the common dandelion has long been stuck in a public relations roundabout, unable to bury its reputation as a garden thug and abettor of incontinence.
Yet as children, I remember us blowing on the feathery lollipop and watching the wind whisk our wishes to destinations unknown. When we ran out of wishes, we’d wait for the white fuzzy particles to blossom into miniature suns and pixelate the ground a picturesque buttery yellow. The leaves we’d leave to the adults, because once cooked and modestly paired with some garlic, oil and the juice of a freshly squeezed lemon, they’d accompany our meals. Although any self-respecting child would have preferred a bowl of medicine.
Now the mortal enemy of the fussed-over greensward, the dandelion was for millennia actively courted by gardeners, farmers and apothecaries for its nutritive and healing properties. The plant is so brazenly loaded with vitamins, minerals and fibres that Theseus is reputed to have dieted strictly on dandelions for 30 straight days before fighting the Minotaur, who was dieting on young Athenians.
But perhaps the highest compliment we can pay the common dandelion is that it is prodigiously unshakeable. It unfalteringly returns every year thumbing its nose at middle-class neighbourhoods everywhere, and does what all plants are born to do: draw nutrients from the soil in order to survive.
Unsurprisingly, the name “dandelion” stems from “dent-de-lion,” which is French for “lion’s tooth,” in tribute to the plant’s serrated leaf.
I never delivered that bouquet to my elementary school teacher. Had I but some of the dandelion’s fierce spirit, a little of that lion’s tooth mettle.
How I wish…