This article is provided as a public service by the Geophysical Institute, University of Alaska Fairbanks, in cooperation with the UAF research community. Larry Gedney is a seismologist at the Institute. From May to first frost it is with us.
Children delight in it.
In the springtime it is pretty, it smells nice, and it's handy for little boys to hold under little girls' chin to see if they've been eating butter. During the summer, it provides hundreds of nifty little parachutes which can be released with just a puff. After that, it just goes sort of blah and the children forget about it. There are those who argue that the flower makes an excellent wine, that the leaves are good in salads and the dried roots can be brewed to produce a kind of tea. But to the lawn tender, the wretched dandelion is the greatest scourge of all in every state except a blessed few in the extreme south.