Dandies

Why wage war against your dandelions? Embrace them, encourage them as food for tortoises. Enjoy their sunny flowers, and their silky parachute clocks. Who wants a monoculture lawn anyway? Not me.

The "flower" is in fact an inflorescence, a capitulum of hundreds of tiny flowers, packed in spirals around the receptacle. Unlike daisies, which have sunny tubular florets at the centre and white ray florets at the edge, the dandelion has just the ray or ligulate florets. The stigmas, like fused paired walking sticks project upwards, and are sheathed by a tube of pollen rich anthers. There were bees and hoverflies visiting in the morning sun gathering pollen and feeding on nectar.

All this floral exuberance is totally redundant. The seeds are genetic copies of the parent plants, there is no fertilisation involved. Dandelions are apomicts. They could do without the showy flowers, the copious pollen and nectar, the inflorescences could hide in their bracts and simply open to reveal the matured seeds ready to blow in the wind. But they give us and the insect visitors a gift, with nothing expected in return. We need to learn to love them. Botanists do, or some botanists anyway, as there are 150 or so "species" recognised in the UK, a taxonomist's delight, an ecologist's nightmare.