Does the Lion Bite?

Yesterday I spent the better part of the day on my hands and knees exterminating dandelions. After about an hour, I began to ask myself just why am I doing this? There was no particularly good answer forthcoming. Up in Roberts Creek (unlike down in Point Roberts), we have a lawn and I never dig the dandelions out of the lawn because they get mowed regularly. In Point Roberts, where I have no lawn--just pathways through whatever the nature deities grow in the areas that are not specific flowerly gardens—I wouldn’t dream of digging up dandelions. Except in the pathways that are covered with wood chips and pecan shells.

Okay, maybe there’s some logic here. Yesterday I was digging the dandelions out of the gravel driveway and the beaten earth area around the wood shed. So maybe it’s that dandelions offend me when they are growing in something that ISN’T either grass or plain dirt. Nope. I dig them up out of the flower beds, too, which is clearly dirt. So maybe dandelions can grow only in grass in my rule book. It just makes no sense, I tell myself, to keep trying to exterminate them, except in the flower beds where they will quickly drive everything else out.

When I was a kid, when my children were kids, when my grandchildren were kids, we all would come in at some point with a handful of dandelions, looking for a jelly glass with water to put them in. We wanted them to be displayed on the dinner table where all could admire their beauty, our good work, and our good judgment in gathering them. They were desirable flowers then for us. Why not now? What did we know then that we have now forgotten? Or have we learned something along the way that escaped us as children? The lions do have a strong, slightly unpleasant smell, but they also have gorgeous color and intricately shaped and abundant petals; they grow easily and are long-lasting.. And they have one of the best flower names in the world: Dandelions, Dandy Lions, Dents de Leons (teeth of lions). Any of those three are names worth having, worth admiring, worth saving. In the northwest, we also have another wild plant similar to the Dandy Lion: the also French-named Langues du Chats, which in English becomes not Cats’ Tongues but Cats’ Ears. Felines both, these plants, the cats and the lions: independent little guys who like to hang around people but don’t like to submit to them too much. We, on the other hand, would like them to submit just a little more.

Several years ago, I was conducting the standard war on slugs that never stops during the warmer months up here. I was engaged in a particularly aggressive campaign of gathering and killing slugs every night after dinner. I was finding myself the sole executioner of a hundred a night, then two hundred. After a week, I began really to feel like an executioner and I gave it all up and stopped planting things that slugs are interested in consuming wholesale. Maybe it’s time to start giving the cats and the lions of the yard the same consideration: at least if they are not in the flower beds, where they really will take over. In other places, maybe there’s no bite involved.