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| Dandelions in a Tree, EKS |
Dandelion
The dandelion, Taraxacum
offifinale, is another member of the daisy family, Asteraceae. All sixty varieties have a composite flower head, a bright
yellow mop of rayed petals that produce a tufted ball of fragile seeds, hollow
stems with milky sap, green toothed leaves in a rosette form at the base, and a
long, annoyingly sturdy tap root (Hogan 1400). The name is a corruption of
French dent de lion -- lion’s tooth
-- which is said to refer to the shape of leaves, or to the whiteness of the
root, or to the golden color of the petals (Folkard 166). Despite its status as a nuisance weed, all
parts of the plant are edible, and it has one of the longest lists of
food-related and medicinal uses in the botanical pharmacology. The roots can be
roasted for a coffee substitute, the leaves eaten in salads, and the flowers
made into wine. Dandelion tea is said to
help the liver; its efficacy as a diuretic has led to it being called the
equivalent of piss-flower in many languages (Watts 100). Like the daisy it is thermostatic, and its
regular opening and closing times caused it to be referred to as the “shepherd’s
clock” (Folkard 166). Also, like the daisy, it was and still is used to
foretell the future; dispersed like a cloud of tiny parachutes, the fragile
puffball of seeds is blown to make a wish, to discover a lover’s name, to
foretell the number of one’s children or the length of one’s life. [1] In the Victorian language of flowers it was
known as “Rustic Oracle” (Greenaway 15).
Dandelions make eight appearances in Woolf’s writing, almost
always in the role of randomly sown weeds. The only time she refers to them in
her life writing is when she and Leonard are first putting the garden into
order at Monk’s House in September of 1919 when she confides to her diary her
pleasure in “uprooting thick dandelions and groundsel” (D1 302). Otherwise her references
tend to emphasize the airy, accidental dispersal of the seeds. In the early
short story, “The Mysterious Case of Miss V” (1906), a list of “fantastic
expedition[s]” includes setting out in an omnibus “to visit the shadow of a
bluebell in Kew Gardens when the sun stands halfway down the sky! or to catch
the down from a dandelion! at midnight in a Surrey meadow” (CSF 31). In a 1918 TLS review “Caution and Criticism,” she
presents dandelions as evanescent and unimportant, rebuking the unsystematic
reportage of a literary study in which the author pronounces “carefully
balanced judgments upon books which, so far as we can see, no more deserve
description than the dandelions of the year before last” (E2 304). A similar sense of accidental
unremarkableness accompanies her account of “Eccentrics” (1919) who are “like a
weed picked by mistake with the roses, or a dandelion that the wind has wafted
to a bed primly sown with prize specimens of the double aster” (E3 39).
On a couple of occasions, Woolf simply notes the dandelion’s
nuisance status. In “A Letter to a Lady in Paraguay” (1922) she refers rather
ironically to “nature’s genius” which “creates the cabbage and the dandelion
and smothers all the hedgerows with foaming cow’s parsley in June” (E6 393). In
Orlando, the perfection of his patron’s lawn, whose “turf had for three
centuries known neither dandelion nor dock weed” is one of the rural tranquilizers
that causes Nick Greene to flee back to the noise of Fleet Street (O 68).
Only Woolf’s last two mentions of the dandelions as “clocks”
invoke any of its many folkloric allusions. Her review of Augustine Birrell’s Collected Essays (1930) emphasizes the
writer’s natural grace: “How lightly and easily he casts the line of his
sentence! ‘gentle as is the breath with which a child disperses a
dandelion-clock’ he says in his preface” (E5 148). And in Between the Acts, another “natural,” the village idiot Albert,
signifies the passage of time by puffing out his cheeks to mime blowing a
“dandelion clock” (BTA 60).
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| "Clocks" Color-reduction Woodcut by EKS |
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