I can’t forget to give some space to the humble dandelion in my 2020 count. Dandelions were rampant in our lawn and garden when we moved to this house in 1995. I loved our neighbor, Phyllis, who had a wonderful perspective. Her lawn was more yellow than green in the spring with dandelion flowers and she loved it. She said she didn’t think of them as weeds, she just thought they had pretty flowers.

We tried to eliminate them from the lawn, at least, because it felt like any of these plants that went to seed would result in a thousand more non-grass plants in the lawn. Before I was more aware of the dangers of lawn products to wildlife and watersheds, we tried weed and feed products. This backfired because there were so many dandelions that when they died, they left big open spots were new dandelions could germinate!

We’re at a point where I can manually weed out any dandelions from the lawn. But they still pop up in the flower beds and get missed when I’m weeding. Inevitably, the cheery yellow flowers raise their perky faces and laugh at how seriously we take it all. I found this one today in the memory garden.

My future plans for dandelions are to keep chasing them down and removing them while knowing full-well they will always be with me. I might try eating some, too, now that our lawn is organic.