Dandelion is a most important menu item for pollinators in early spring.

My mother recently told me a story about dandelions. Some years ago, she invited a group of ladies over for brunch. The morning before the big visit, she was baking up a storm, dusting, polishing silver, selecting her best china, and so on. She also enlisted my Dad to mow the lawn to make sure the ladies’ arrival to her home would be agreeable, too.

That evening, she glanced out the window and was horrified to see – despite the mowing - a host of bright yellow dandelion flower heads peaking out of the cut grass on the front lawn. She hurried outside with a bag and pulled about 50 Dandelion flowers for the bin. She wasn’t going to let these weeds ruin her special event. Whatever would the ladies think if they saw them? Catastrophe avoided.

But the next morning, when she pulled back her bedroom curtains, she was greeted by another 100 or so bright sunny dandelions waving at her from her lawn!

This is probably one of the reasons dandelions are so disliked – they are prolific and hardy and ubiquitous. They can spring up on footpaths, in flowerbeds, through tarmac, and fit perfectly our definition of a ‘weed’ – a plant growing where it’s not wanted.

Why did we decide we hate dandelions? Perhaps it’s all in the name. Alternative names for the dandelion include pee-the-bed and wet-the bed, referring to their diuretic properties. This led to the belief that picking the flowers would lead to bed wetting. And this isn’t confined to Ireland, going by the French name ‘pissenlit’ and the Dutch ‘pisse-bed’.

The name ‘dandelion’ comes from the Latin name ‘dens leonis’, ‘lion’s tooth’ which may refer to the jagged leaves or flower parts. I love the old names for dandelion seeds, Jimmyjoes or Jinnyjoes, which hail from Dublin.

Not too long ago, the dandelion was a much-appreciated wildflower. In Ireland, the dandelion is linked with St Brigid, giving it the name Bearnán Bríde, ‘the indented one of Brigid’, probably as it is one of the first wildflowers in bloom after St Brigid’s Festival. All parts of the plant are edible. The young leaves can be eaten as a salad, while the flowers were once used to make a potent wine, and the roots can be dry roasted to make ‘coffee’.

According to the ancient Brehon Laws, a doctor’s bag should contain various small compartments for medicinal herbs, including dandelion, which was used for cuts, colds, coughs, liver trouble, rheumatism, diabetes, TB, jaundice, stomach upsets or as a tonic to cleanse the blood.

One cure for warts recommended the juice of the dandelion be applied for nine consecutive mornings, while praying. Medicine that was used to cure chickenpox also contained dandelion, but it only worked if a man gave it to the sick woman or a woman gave it to the sick man.

Our wild plants were also widely used in children’s games. Children used the fluffy heads of dandelions to tell the time. The number of puffs it took to blow away all the seeds counted the number of hours – three puffs meant three o’clock, etc. This gave rise to the dandelion’s other name of ‘clock’. Alternatively, the number of puffs were taken as the number of years until a person got married, or it could be used for the ‘Love me, love me not’ game, just like with a daisy. And, of course, what I did most as a child, was to use the dandelion clock to make a wish.

Appearing at the same time of year as the much-loved daffodil, and with similar colour, it’s a pity we can love one flower and despise the other so much. Planting daffodils offers as much for biodiversity as sticking plastic flowers in the ground. This is because daffodils actually contain little or no pollen and nectar, while dandelions offer copious amounts of this vital food for hungry pollinators at this time of year. The daffodils we plant in their millions, at huge cost, will have long withered and drooped, while these free wild spheres of sunshine, the underappreciated dandelions, will bloom on for many months.

Bees, butterflies and other important pollinators require a varied diet, needing to forage on lots of different wildflowers, but in early spring the availability of nectar-rich dandelions can tide them over when there are few other flowers in bloom. Later, birds can feast on the dandelion seed-heads, a favourite with birds such as the goldfinch and greenfinch. The plant’s leaves are also food for some moth larvae, including the lovely garden tiger moth. Between birds and bees, what more could one small flower offer to the world?

In this time of a biodiversity crisis, can we learn to live with dandelions? If we could only let the dandelions enjoy their first spring bloom, this would be a valuable, simple way to help biodiversity. Your fingers may be itching to turn the key in your lawnmower, but perhaps you could leave some dandelions for the birds and the bees?

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