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It may be too late in the summer to speak of dandelions. But they linger, if you look.
In a vegetable garden at the nursery we had kohlrabi which was planted late and has been growing late, and each night the bunnies – big year for rabbits this year – came in and took a leaf, then another leaf another night, so that in a few days all we were left with were kohlrabi hearts, which we, throwing in the towel, took and cut up and ate fresh like sacrificial bread. Delicious.
Too, the bunnies were cutting their teeth on the two-year-old potted tamaracks, the lower branches of which the bunnies cut off and left laying around, attracted by the woodiness and the scent. The hare, like other rodents, needs to sharpen its incisors.
So the executive decision was made to reduce our losses by trapping the bunnies – or bunny – doing the damage.
I set a live trap in the yard and after a week– a week in which the chipmunk, too light to set off the trap, took the carrots and crabapples and chocolate etc. – we finally live-trapped a young-of-this-year bunny.
Whatever bait we had in the live trap was eaten up. He – or she – was sitting squat in the live trap with round eyes, and overnight the wire box had become, like Stockholm-city syndrome, a safe place.
I carried the little guy in the live trap back to the truck and placed it in the backseat. Then drove up 61 a quarter-mile to my brother’s place. Then took it, quietly, out back behind the house under the tall spruce and shade maples in the carpeted forest.
When I opened the live trap our little friend wouldn’t come out, so I turned the live trap over on end and shook him out and he clung to the wire cage like it was his Stockholm all over again, and he finally fell on the forest floor at my feet. And sat there. Wild eyed.
I petted him and he took one hop away, and then, catching a big, feeble dandelion leaf, started munching. Seemed more intent on eating than being free. That’s a Dostoevskian thing to say.
Three things may have been happening. Maybe this little hare was hungry and was satiating himself after – what – 18 hours in the cage. Another dandelion leaf. And another. Maybe the snowshoe hare takes in its water through leafy greens – after all, they don’t go down to Lake Superior to take their drinks. Dandelion leaf four, then five, then six. Maybe sitting there, within my reach, eating dandelion leaves (seven and eight) relieved anxiety. He blinked. His eyelids relaxed a little. Like he was getting mellow stoned.
Without sunlight, in the great woods and in needle or duff soil, the dandelion does not mature, but declines slowly. In the early spring the dandelion sprouts early. It is almost evergreen, like the strawberries, in that as the snow recedes it seems to be there, waiting, ready. At the beginning of the season the leaves on the dandelion are succulent. That is not accurate. In the early spring, before the yellow flowers, the leaves are edible and bitter salad greens. Rich in vitamins.
Spring progresses and the lawns and fields are colored green and yellow with dandelion flowers. Strange that so many other green and yellow flowers are so aesthetic – the buttercup, the Susan, the sun, the yarrow, the cone, the daylily – but the yellow dandelion is so maligned. And there are flowering plants of such poor aesthetic qualities – wild chamomile, the goldenrod, the thistle – that are less maligned.
I can tell you the things I, personally, do not value of the dandelion: the white seed heads that seem like pestilence. The tall, hollow, purpleish stems like rubber. The great white taproots, so strong, so difficult to pull, unlike the shallow lambsquarters and bunched plantains.
Now it is August, and there are still dandelions in abundance. All the dandelions that you missed earlier this summer, their leaves now nearly a foot long, their taproot a foot long, and breaking it, that dandelion will come again next year. Young dandelions that will do no harm this year but, being what they are, pulled anyway.
Leave the bunny…Take the dandelion.
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