Waiting for a breeze

A field on the edge of Durham city, full of thousands of dandelion 'clocks', waiting for a breeze to carry their plumed seeds aloft. 

The final phase in the dandelion life cycle, when the flowers are transformed into silvery spheres, dandelion ‘clocks’ composed of seeds each equipped with its own parachute, is a magical moment when an umbrella of hairs, a pappus in botanical parlance, carries the seed up and away on the wind, to pastures new. At sunrise in late spring, whole fields can shimmer with silvery dandelion clocks as their pappuses expand as they dry in the sun’s heat. Sometimes goldfinches arrive to feed on the seeds, releasing wraiths of downy seeds, ethereal ‘witches’ gowns’, into the rising thermals.

The name dandelion is a corruption of the French dent-de-lion, lion’s teeth, describing the deeply serrated leaf edges, but botanist Geoffrey Grigson also collected 52 parochial county names. Some, like Devil’s Milk-plant (Kirkudbrightshire), refer to the bitter milky sap. Many, like Schoolboys’ Clock and Tell Time (both Somerset) allude to the childhood game of guessing the time by the number of puffs needed to blow away all its seeds from the ‘clock’. Monk’s head (Wiltshire), likening the bare seed head left behind to a monk’s bald pate, is said to have medieval origins, while Wishes (Wiltshire) stems from the belief that the airborne seeds carry away hopes and dreams with them.

 And perhaps this is the best name of all, for these troubled times. Pick a dandelion clock, rediscover your inner child, blow as hard as you can and send dandelion seeds skywards, into the blue.