I’ve been inspired – again – by the seductive beauty of herbs, local herbs, and their use as tonics, remedies, lifters, brighteners, waste disposal enhancers, friends and allies. In my slightly random journey through the College of Practitioners of Phytotherapy’s ‘Discovering Hebal Medicine’ course, I’ve started to look at the lovely Dandylion in a new light.
The first insight that has landed is that I am not always sure – as I used to be in my ignorance – as to whether what I think is a dandylion, is actually a dandylion at casual glance. James Green’s wonderful boook ‘The Herbal Medicine-Maker’s Handbook’ came to my aid in the first few pages, in which he points out most helpfully that dandylion has bald leaves, not hairy or lumpy, and that the flowers sit imperiously alone on their stems, not sharing or branching. I knew that, didn’t I? No.
At a distance there are a number of dandylion lookalikes which I have often mistaken for the real Pisenlit. On closer investigation though, their stems are harder and thinner (not so much milky juice therein) and branched… more than one flower head coming out of the same stem. Hmmm. And their leaves are hirsute and, in fact, not the right shape at all for a plant named ‘Lions’ Teeth’.
I may become a right pain in the … demanding that we stop at every yellow headed candidate on Arthur’s Seat, in order to determine whether they are what I once thought they were. As we did this last weekend, turning a swift tour of the rocks into a lengthy tramp across meadows in pursuit of yellow blobby things.
