Now is a good time to touch on some distinguishing identifying plant characteristics!
Dandelions (Taraxacum officinale)
- official (designated Latin name) medicinal and nutritive qualities have been treasured and trusted for millennia.
- are common plants, but not ordinary.
- have non-edible uses like for dye, and many edible uses, including salad, cooked green, cooked vegetable, fritters, coffee, and…TEA!!!
- grow in mesophytic, xerophytic and hydrophytic habitats (grow in moderately moist, dry, and wet conditions and environments).
- range worldwide from the arctic to the tropics, especially in sunny areas.
- thrive in flower beds, lawns, pastures, meadows, roadsides, moist/open places.
- solitary yellow flower heads grow atop unbranched, hairless, leafless, milky, hollow stalks that later yield downy white tufted “parachute” seedballs.
- outer bracts (sometimes mistakenly called sepals) of its many-rayed yellow flowers are reflexed downwards.
- deeply notched lance-shaped leaves have irregular lobes and jagged margins.
- leaves and flower stalks all—every last one of them!—grow straight out of the ground directly from the taproot in a basal rosette configuration.
- reach a height of about 2-18 inches (5-45 cm.).
The descriptive name of the plant comes through the Middle English form of dandelion, dent-de-lioun, borrowed from the Old French dentdelion, from Medieval Latin dēns leōnis, literally, “tooth of the lion,” (from the sharply indented leaves of the plant) < Latin dēns, dent-, tooth [cf. dental, dentist] + Latin leōnis, genitive of leō, lion [cf. Leo, lion]. The word dandelion occurs in an herbal written in 1373, and in a proper name (Willelmus Dawndelyon) in a document dated 1363. Numerous folk names for this widely-used herb identification include bitterwort (taste), blow ball (and make a wish), cankerwort (natural remedy), clock flower (to “tell time”), doonheadclock, lion’s tooth, priest’s crown, pissabed (diuretic proterties), puffball, swine snort, wild endive, and yellow gowan (yellow kind of a common daisy).
Dandelions belong to the big sunflower family Asteraceae (formerly Compositae), along with over 10% of the world’s flowers. Blossoms are organized into an involucrate pseudanthium in the form of a head (or capitulum). This immediately recognizable characteristic-even from a distance-makes dandelions and their relatives the easiest, and possibly largest, family of flowering plants to identify.
The successful floral configuration surprises almost everyone; indeed, a dandelion is not simply one flower, but perhaps a hundred. Each flower makes a dry-seeded fruit (an achene) attached to a downy parachute, forming the fluffy white puffball every child likes to blow away into the wind (and then make a wish).
Composite blooms are mostly two types of flowers: ray flowers (outer “petals”, as pulled off a daisy, “…loves me, loves me not…”) and disc flowers (inner center, like the “eye” in Black-Eyed Susans). This exclusive asteraceous inflorescence likely ensures being the best-represented plants in any chosen backyard.
Dandelion relatives include herbs, shrubs, and some trees, food and ornamental plants such as:
ARTICHOKE
ASTER
CHAMOMILE
CHICKORY
CHRYSANTHEMUM
DAHLIA
ENDIVE
LETTUCE
MARIGOLD
SAGEBRUSH
STEVIA
THISTLE
YARROW
ZINNIA
With Kevin’s Low’s kind permission, we will show you here his photographs of a dandelion relative (white ray flowers as “petals” surrounding yellow disc flowers clumped in a central cluster) that is “growing wild all over the place” in Malaysia:
We look forward to learning the name of this plant and if it is edible/medicinal, perhaps like chamomile tea… If you know, please write us your comments! Thanks! We look forward to hearing from you!
Common activities children like to do with dandelions include plucking a bright yellow blossom and holding it under someone’s chin “to see if they like butter”, and forming a golden crown, necklace, or bracelet by making a cut in one flower stalk and inserting the blossom of different flower stalk into it, one after another.
A folk name for dandelion, yellow gowan (gowan: yellow kind of a common daisy) refers to the blooming dandelion’s bright golden yellow. Is there any other color?
Click the Pretty Pink to order these dandelion relatives.
