The Most Beautiful Flower of All

I was shocked and appalled by an ad I received in the mail today. It was from the Lawn Doctor, a lawn care company. The ad shows a fist with a green thumb pointing up. From the thumb there emerges a balloon with the following words within: "One, two, three, four, I declare a dandelion war."

Why do people want to destroy the most beautiful plant and flower in the world? Just look at it! Beautiful green dentate leaves reaching to the sky, with long slim stems topped by the most brilliant yellow flowers. And when the beautiful yellow flowers are used up, they transform into balls of light white fluffiness that send little angels out to sail on the breeze.

I was born near the end of the Great Depression and sometimes we did not have much to eat, so my job was to dig up as many dandelions as I could find so that my grandmother could cook the greens for us to eat. I liked the taste, and still do, especially when very hot and topped with melted butter.

The flower is also useful in the making of wine. In the 1970's I made a bunch of it.. (we had a lot of dandelions in our yard). Most people say that the wine comes out yellow.. mine came out white.. and sweet.. and delicious, if I do say so myself. For a vacation to Massachusetts one year, I mixed dandelion and port wine, sweetened with sugar.. and bottled it in small containers. When relatives and friends visited us in our vacation house, I fed them some of the wine, it tasted just like Portuguese wine (kind of like Madiera).. everybody loved it, especially one guy who told everyone within ear shot that I was the best winemaker in the world.

One of our next door neighbors here confronted me last week. He said that he noticed dandelions in my grass. He asked if I minded if he killed them so they would not multiply. I'm afraid I had to assume the Jack Benny pose while I decided how to answer him. In the interest of good neighborliness, I gave in and told him to go ahead, but my heart was not in it.

I believe that all beautiful flowers were once considered to be obnoxious weeds.. sooner or later the world will begin to let dandelions assume their rightful place in the pantheon of glorious offspring of this remarkable world we live in.