Dandelion

The common dandelion is a hardy perennial of the daisy family, native to Europe and Asia and first carried to America as a food crop; it is now naturalised across North America, southern Africa, South America, Australia, New Zealand and India. A long taproot sends up a rosette of jagged, deeply toothed leaves and hollow, leafless stalks, each bearing one yellow flower head that ripens into a round ball of seeds on silky white parachutes, the "clock" that children puff away. The whole plant runs with a milky latex. Its name is the French for lion's tooth, after the leaves, while the French pissenlit and the English piss-a-bed point to its long use as a diuretic. Cursed as a lawn weed, it is also an early source of pollen for insects. The leaves are eaten as greens, the flowers make wine, jam and a honey-like syrup, and the roasted root has stood in for coffee; Northcote tells of Minorcans who lived on the root after locusts ate their harvest. Blowing the seed head is an old way of reading fate: Cunningham counts the seeds that remain to learn the hour or the years left in a life, and in the British Isles a wish made as the seeds flew was expected to come true. Kynes adds that in parts of England the drifting seeds were called fairies, and that dandelions gathered on Midsummer's Eve kept witches away.