Little Weed
April 22, 2008Question. When is a weed not a weed?
Answer. When it is feast.
This bee was carrying so much pollen I was starting to wonder if it would mange to get airborne and make it back to the hive.
The dandelion, Taraxacum officinale; as a child I used to spend hours in the fields collecting these flower heads, by the bucket full for my Dad, who used to make dandelion wine from them, just taking that photo has wafted back in time, to the smell of them being boiled up in a steamy kitchen and gluup, gluup noise of the air locks on the demijohns as it brewed.
nezza has a lovely photograph of a dandelion ‘clock’ on her Flickr site
What a beautiful photo and memory, I can almost smell them!
Lovely picture. Dandelions evoke memories of holding them under friends’ chins just to see the reflected golden glow. My mother-in-law used to pick the young greens and put them in salad–a taste of spring.
My mother let dandelions, and daisies, grow in the lawn! As far as she was concerned weeds were just flowers in the wrong place regardless of what they were.
Here’s another photo like yours http://www.londondailynaturephoto.co.uk/index.php?showimage=390
Agreed flighty, although I am not so accommodating of docks; Sigh, macro lens desired for more flower photos. There is something very, childlike, primary about dandelions, not sure I would want to make coffee from them though.
I think a batch of dandelion wine could be brewed from the patch in my back yard! Very cool photo.
Beautiful photo and beautiful memory.
I’ve always liked dandelions. I don’t know why people want to rid their lawns of them. I think the yellow makes everything look prettier. And I like eating the young greens in a salad.
Weeds are only plants growing in the wrong place - a rose in a potato patch is a weed. I love dandelions, though I’ve never eaten one (is that just the leaves?)
I’ve often been tempted to cultivate dandelions, because they look so gorgeous. But I know I would soon have them all over my garden and they would completely take over! Thank goodnes there are wild places where the bees can still enjoy them.
You have dandy lions already! I’m jealous. Love their furry yellow heads and their drinking-straw stems - even the bitter milky sap takes me back to early childhood.
The trilliums are budding here, so I have those to look forward to. Down on the beach there are flowers so tiny that I’d need a macro lens to take a picture so I could blow it up on my laptop to actually see them . . .
Good grief, look at that sentence. To think that when I am not abusing the language I are a writer . . .
[...] written before how flowers can send you back in time, date stamp a time and place, be it happy or sad, Dame Honoria Glossop writes about a similar [...]