skip to main |
skip to sidebar
I have a copy of The Story of Living Things and Their Evolution by Eileen Mayo. With a foreword by Professor Julian Huxley, the book has nearly 1000 beautiful illustrations by Mayo.
Dandelions are used as an example of how some plants make movements in response to light, dark, warmth, cold and touch.
I have a copy of The Third Girl Annual. It's undated but has a handwritten message inside the front cover dated 1954. There's a lovely Country Names piece written by Kenneth Sparrow that looks at flowers and the origins of their names. It has beautiful illustrations by Harry A Pettit. Of Dandelions it says this:
"The common Dandelion in bud is sometimes called 'swines snout' because the bud has a turned up end like a pig's snout. The name Dandelion probably refers to the jagged leaves. The divisions of the leaf are rather tooth-like. The French word for tooth is 'dent'. The flower of the Dandelion is yellow and rather like the mane of a lion. From all this we have the word dent-de-lion... lions tooth; and dent-de-lion slurred quickly becomes Dandelion."
I find that rum helps to slur your words - works a treat.
There's a Healthy Planet bookshop here in Preston where you can donate books and also have books for free too. With moving house (again) and trying to down size I decided to take a bag of unwanted books to the bookshop today.
Under no circumstances was i allowed to come home with any more books. And so, with this strict rule in mind, i came away with a book.
It's How Flowers Grow, published by Macdonald and Company with lovely illustrations - they haven't named the artist but there are initials PAL by some of the images.
There are 3 dandelion illustrations: one on the cover and 2 inside the book. Rules are made to be broken - so i had to have it for the Dandelion Archive.
According to my book Plant Folklore, Pocket Reference Digest, by Geddes and Grosset (published in 1999):
"The individual seeds [of a dandelion], as they drift on the breeze, are said to be fairies, and it was considered lucky to catch one because when it was let go a wish would be granted."
