COLUMNIST: SCOTT GALLOWAY
Native across the northern hemisphere, dandelions can be found growing in meadows and along roadside verges, as well as popping up in our lawns and the cracks of the pavements of our streets. Although today they are considered a pernicious garden weed, dandelions have been used medicinally for centuries, alongside being an essential food crop, and even a substitute for coffee.
In Scotland alone, there are over 120 different common names for dandelion, ranging from Devil’s milk-plant in Kircudbrightshire to Stink-daisie in Clackmannanshire, Pee-the-beds in Fife to Bitter-aks in Shetland. In Gaelic, it is commonly referred to as Bearnan Bride.
The name dandelion, however, is derived from the French 'dent de lion’, meaning lion’s teeth, referring to the plant’s toothed leaves. The more common piss-the-bed is derived from ‘pissenlit’, another French word ascribed to the plant because of the common belief that touching or plucking a dandelion will make you wet the bed.
All parts of the plant are edible, including the aerial parts and roots. They are rich in vitamins A, B, C, and D, as well as minerals, making dandelion an attractive food crop in places such as France, where growers force the plants, as one would rhubarb, to produce tender, less bitter leaves for use in salads.
Traditionally, the plant was used to ease digestion and treat intestinal complaints, while the sap was applied to worts. The diuretic effects of the plant have been studied and proven to be effective in both herb and root preparations. The high potassium content is considered to support its diuretic effects, aiding the elimination of toxins from the body.
If you want to support pollinators in your garden, then there is no better native wildflower than dandelion. The pollen and nectar-rich composite bright yellow flowers are at their peak from March to May, but flower throughout the year, and provide an essential early food source for many pollinators as they emerge from hibernation. Bumblebees, solitary bees, honeybees, hoverflies, beetles, and butterflies all rely on dandelions but often miss out at this important time of year as the blades of our lawnmowers raise them to the ground in our parks, gardens, and roadside verges.
This is changing in some places with the adoption of no-mow May, but as much as I would encourage everyone with a lawn to do this, simply taking a few weeks off mowing between late March and the end of May can hugely benefit local pollinators and invite more biodiversity into your garden.
There are almost 2500 species of dandelion growing across the northern hemisphere. In the UK, it is known botanically as Taraxacum officinale, although there are in fact c.250 micro-species growing here, with several endemics found in the Outer Hebrides and Shetland Islands.
Taxonomically, dandelions are a challenging genus for botanists today. To make it a little easier to digest, they have split the species into nine Sections. In this, Taraxacum Section Taraxacum contains six rare arctic-alpine species which occur in very small populations among rocks and base-rich soils in the mountains of Central Scotland. Taraxacum Section Spectabilia is even more exciting, in that of its five species, four are endemic to our islands: Taraxacum geirhildae to mainland Shetland, alongside T. palmeri, and T. serpenticola to serpentine rock on the island of Unst, while T. pankhurstianum is said to be the only species of dandelion present on the now uninhabited island of St. Kilda.
The many micro-species growing across Scotland and the UK are often separated by very small morphological features to the leaves, flowers, stems, and peduncle. Most, however, carry the instantly recognisable rosette of saw-toothed green leaves and bright yellow flowers. If you are looking for something a little more interesting though then you should look to the dandelions of Central and East Asia.
The pink and golden-yellow bi-coloured T. pseudoroseum from Kazakhstan, for example, is a real showstopper. It is also easy to propagate with a heat mat in early spring, with germination taking about a week.
Taraxacum coreanum, native to Far East Russia, North China, and Korea, is another superb species, producing pure white flowers with a delicate yellow centre in spring. This is a slightly trickier species to grow as it requires a period of cold stratification over winter, and even then can be fussy about germinating. You might have better success with T. albidum, an almost identical species to T. coreanum native to Southern Japan, and which only requires a week or so on the heat mat at 15-20°C to germinate.
Regardless of whether you love or loathe dandelions, their value in the garden is undeniable: not only are they good for wildlife, they are also edible and medicinal. I can think of no other native wildflower with so much to offer, yet we treat them with such disregard. I hope you will join me in praising the dandelion and celebrating their abundance in spring this year.
Scott Galloway is a Glasgow based horticulturist currently working in biodiversity policy development in local government. He has worked in horticulture for over 6 years in various roles across the National Trust for Scotland, Royal Horticultural Society, and Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh.
Scott is a researcher of bergenia and has built a collection of more than 150 plants, from which he produced the first ever phylogeny of the genus in 2023. He is now expanding his work to include the study of another garden favourite rodgersia, and is interested in growing a wide range of Himalayan, Central, and East Asian plants. He is also specialises in herb growing, and has recently leased a horticultural facility from which he hopes to propagate some of the many interesting and unusual plants in his collection.
Follow Scott on Instagram for more chat and watch his bergenia collection grow on @thebergenlist!