The Dandelion:
Defiler of Lawns
Granter of Wishes

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Behold, the dandelion- taraxacum officinale. Its tawny golden mane and rosette of inward-hooking basal leaves should be familiar to even the least horticulturally inclined among you. The name of the dandelion is a bastardization of the French for "lion's tooth"- should you need lion's tooth for a potion, therefore, a delightfully vegan substitute could be found in our friend here. Nearly all parts of the dandelion are edible- those fanged leaves can be harvested in early summer, while tender and green, and eaten as salad greens; teas and soups alike make use of the bittersweet flowers; and the root, properly dried, can be made into a diuretic tea or even roasted and ground as a coffee substitute. Yes, really!
Alas, mankind has been equally cruel and kind to the dandelion. She wakes in the summer, and her devout soldiers march out onto our lawns and across our fields, bathing everything in fluffy golden blooms. But Man, in their ongoing quest for ruthless conformity, deny her. They send a haze of foul vapors across the lands she inhabits, killing her children and smiting her armies. But all of this is in vain. The dandelion is hopeful, you see. She sprouts out of the cracks with a vengeance, finding root in sidewalk cracks where children tread. And with them she has formed a sweet symbiosis, while their minds still entertain a love of the natural world and a belief in magic and play.
For you see, the humble dandelion has a wonderful trick to her propagation. As summer dies, her surviving flowers retreat into fat green buds; and when they open again, a pappus of fluffy white seeds appear in their place. And she sings a sweet lullaby to humanity and her fallen soldiers. "Make a wish, blessed ones," she says, "make a wish." And year after year, we do. So year after year, she will return. Our war against her will never cease, it seems.
This is good.