back to the dandelions

To be sure, this isn't a regular dandelion, a taraxacum officinale, but yellow salsify, or Tragopogon dubius

- which has a tighter yellow flower that taraxacum o, but is, broadly speaking, dandelion-adjacent.  To quote the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory website, "Salsify looks like a dandelion on steroids," and it disseminates its seed in just the same  big puffball like way. It's also known as "western goat's beard," or "yellow goat's beard," or "goat's beard" - not hard to imagine why.  It's not a native, but an invasive plant, originating in south and central Europe and Western Asia, and does tend to crowd out native flowers in wildflower meadows.

I returned to my Dandelion chapter today after a long gap, and have both shredded and re-written.  It's a chapter that allows me, among other things, to examine the whole set of nationalist assumptions that underpin the nomenclature of "native" and "invasive" species, and to balance the demands of long-lasting habitats with the uneasy linkages between the celebration of species that have long been found in a certain region or country with proto-fascism.  Of course, it lets me do other things as well, not least to investigate what gets called a weed and what doesn't (and why), and to celebrate the dandelion as a model for resistance (something that it shares with kudzu, and, alas, with tumbleweed.  They both will get their paragraphs, at least ...).  

This summer - or what's left of it - is firmly designated a writing summer: it's good to have made a real start, and to be returning to a whole lot of dandelion paintings.  I'm super grateful to the grad student who introduced me to Emily Mary Osborn's The Bal Maidens this semester - gathering dandelions and other wild flowers from the wayside, and blowing on a dandelion seed head, on their way to work in the Cornish tin mines - it gave me just the chapter opening that I needed.