A small child sees these pretty little yellow flowers and with great delight picks a bouquet as a love offering for “mommy” who receives the gift with great delight. The lowly dandelion is more than just a pretty face however.  It labours constantly with the earth for our well being. Sending down its long tap root it loosens and aerates the soil and brings much needed nutrients more to the surface to feed other plant life with shallower root systems.

I have tasted some fine dandelion wine, and just the other day while having dinner with some Italian friends I was asked by the mother, an excellent cook, if she could come in the spring to pick some of the abundant crop of dandelions on our property of the Ignatius Jesuit Centre of Guelph.  Their tender young leaves serve as delicious and nourishing salad greens.

This generous self-sacrificing wild flower must wonder why so many humans try to extinguish it from the face of the earth, even to the extent of using chemical warfare, in the process risking their own health and wellbeing and that of others. I suppose the resulting illnesses could be called collateral damage.

               The late Jim Profit, SJ often spoke of the dandelion as a Christ figure and a symbol of the  wanton suffering we inflict on the earth and its creatures .  The dandelion, despised and rejected by so many, refuses to give up its constant labours for our good.