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Handbook of N ature-Stmiy 



THE DANDELION 

 Teacher's Story 



HIS is the most persistent and indomitable 

 of weeds, yet I think the world would be 

 very lonesome without its golden flower- 

 heads and fluffy seed-spheres. Professor 

 Bailey once said that dandelions in his lawn 

 were a great trouble to him until he learned 

 to love them, and then the sight of them 

 gave him keenest pleasure. And Lowell 

 says of this "dear common flower"- 



"TVs Spring's largess, which she scatters now 

 To rich and poor alike, with lavish hand ; 

 Though most hearts never understand 

 To take it at God's value, and pass by 

 The offered wealth with unrewarded eye." 



It is very difficult for us, when we watch the behavior of the dandelions, 

 not to attribute to them thinking power, they have so many ways of 

 getting ahead of us. I always look at a dandelion and talk to it as if it 

 were a real person. One spring when all the vegetables in my garden 

 were callow weaklings, I found there, in their midst, a dandelion rosette 

 with ten great leaves spreading out and completely shading a circle ten 

 inches in diameter; I said, "Look here, Madam, this is my garden!" and I 

 pulled up the squatter. But I could not help paying admiring tribute to 

 the taproot, which lacked only an inch of being a foot in length. It 

 was smooth, whitish, fleshy and, when cut, bled a milky juice showing 

 that it was full of food ; and it was as strong from the end-pull as a whip- 

 cord ; it also had a bunch of rather fine rootlets about an inch below the 

 surface of the soil and an occasional rootlet farther down ; and then I said 

 "Madam, I beg your pardon ; I think this was your garden and not mine." 



Dandelion leaves afford an excellent study in variation of form. The 

 edges of the leaf are notched in a peculiar way, so that the lobes were, by 

 some one, supposed to look like lions' teeth in profile; thus the plant was 

 called in France "dents-de-lion" (teeth of the lion), and we have made 

 from this the name dandelion. The leaves are so bitter that grazing 

 animals do not like to eat them, and thus the plants are safe even in 

 pastures. 



The hollow stem of the blossom-head from time immemorial has been 

 a joy to children. It may be made into a trombone, which will give to the 

 enterprising teacher an opportunity for a lesson in the physics of sound, 

 since by varying its length, the pitch is varied. The dandelion-curls, 

 which the little girls enjoy making, offer another lesson in physics that of 

 surface tension, too difficult for little girls to understand. But the action 

 of this flower stem is what makes the dandelion seem so endowed with 

 acumen. If the plant is in a lawn, the stem is short, indeed so short that 

 the lawn-mower cannot cut off the flower-head. In this situation it will 

 blossom and seed within two inches of the ground ; but if the plant is in a 

 meadow or in other high grass, the stem lifts up sometimes two feet or 

 more, so that its blossom may be seen by bees and its seeds be carried off 

 by the breeze without let or hindrance from the grass. We found two 

 such stems each measuring over 30 inches in height. 



