Tuesday, May 25, 2021

Do Dandelions Grow On Your Planet, Too?

      I've been wondering since the pandemic and January 6th if maybe I'd wandered into the wrong dimension or been sent to some kind of Hell put together by the lowest bidder, but never really all that seriously....

     At least, not until yesterday, when I went on a walking inspection of the grounds and outside equipment at the North Campus.

     Nice, sunny weather, freshly mowed grass along the lanes sprinkled with dandelions.  Dandelions, but something was off.  They seemed paler than usual, more a light lemon yellow than sunny yellow.  I took a closer look and had to look again, and then at other examples: every plant had multiple flowers on a single stem.  I shivered.  There were several stems on each plant, like a normal dandelion, but the flowers were wrong and the more I looked, the wronger they got.  The leaves were hairy and rounded, and a darker green.

     Dimensional portal?  Wrong planet?  Nope.  Catsears.

     Hypochaeris radicata, if you want to get technical about it.  A relative of the dandelion.  The common name is because of the leaves, furry and with a rounded point, like a cat's ears.

     I have never seen them at the site before but we've got them now, and plenty of them.  They're all over the U.S. and you might not notice they were anything but regular dandelions, out the window of a moving car.

3 comments:

Cop Car said...

Interesting. I had to follow your link, because I'm not sure that I'd ever heard of that plant, before. Thanks for the education. I'll have to check out our own crop of "dandelions"; but, I must say I've not noticed anything different.

Mark Matis said...

So are they edible, like dandelions? Or are they toxic?

Roberta X said...

Cop Car: at least it's not just me, then! Yesterday, I discovered one reason why I hadn't noticed them earlier: they only grow in large numbers on the areas of the North Campus that are mowed regularly, and the guy who does the mowing is retired and loves spending time outdoors. He mows the place weekly if not more often, so it's a rare week when they have time to grow and bloom.

Mark, not only are they edible, the leaves are said to not be bitter the way dandelion leaves get unless they're very young. The root can be used to make a coffee substitute, too, just like dandelions.