Dandelions

[rejectomorph]

Yellow dandelion flowers are poking out of the lawn. They are such bright and cheering little weeds. They have no nasty stickers on them, they don't stink, they don't poison cats. Soon they will grow their delicate seed heads, which children blow with such delight. When I was five or six years old, I wondered why adults had such antipathy for dandelions. I still do. If these pleasant and innocuous little plants vanished, I'd miss them. They are like the persistence of hardy joys, bursting through the regimentation imposed by the dour and unimaginative, the pompous and vain, the pretentious and arrogant. Their small seeds drifting on the summer breeze invariably cheer me with the knowledge that, once again next spring, the puritanical perfection of uniformity will be thwarted by delightful little winks of yellow among the marching green blades of monoculture.

Comments

[marseille.livejournal.com]

When I was growing up, my family had a huge yard, full of wild growth--ivy, myrtle, pachysandra, rock gardens, huge stands of ferns (peel off the leaves, you have a great whip for your pretend horse) a stream, and a huge indestructible lawn full of various low weeds, which it was safe to play rough on--you couldn't ruin it. Never fertilized, always in need of mowing. And great trees to climb. We spent our time trying to keep ahead of the growth, but never had to worry about trying to make it green!
It was a lot more fun than obsessing over the perfect turf, as people do today, mostly to no avail. We picked dandelions, but didn't worry over them!

[rejectomorph]

My father was forever fussing over his lawns when I was a kid. He would tear one out, work the soil, sow seed, water, weed, mow, fertilize, pamper, then tear it out and start over. There were five lawns of various sizes in various parts of the yard. One or another of them was always at one stage or another of its life cycle. Each would get first one kind of grass, then another, then another as my father searched for the perfect match between type of grass, quality of soil and amount of sunlight. The only thing to which he paid more attention than his lawns was his car. Ah, suburbia in the twentieth century! It was a strange way of life.