Maybe there’s another way…

Okay, stay with me here.

I want you to imagine this. You’re standing in your front yard. Or your back yard. And it’s full, everywhere, of trilliums. White trilliums. Deep red trilliums. Full.

You run to Robinson’s Hardware to buy a huge can of concentrate Weed Be Gone. You mix up the concentrate with water, grab your hand sprayer and methodically, a few at a time, kill as many of them as you can.

Your goal is to eradicate the pesty trilliums. All of them.

You look over at your neighbour’s yard with great jealousy. They’ve been almost successful in getting rid of their trilliums… just a few stragglers.

But the people on the other side! Well, they’re slack! Very slack. Their yard is even more concentrated than yours.

Back to the grindstone. You grab your fisker to help the process along, promising an hour every day to eradicate the trilliums.

Now, would you do that?

So let’s take our current consumption of the dandelion… that sunny yellow flower with the health-inducing vegetable leaves. Television ads encourage us to make the rush to the hardware store, spend a weekend digging and eradicating the pests. And we do look at our neighbours lawns (this might be one of the perks of condo and apartment living) with either dismay or a sense of superiority.

Can we step back for a moment?

I wonder if we dug up just one dandelion… a really big one… and added potting soil to a colourful pot and planted the little dear. Alone, without its reputation, cared for with its greenery and its striking colour, the dandelion in full bloom is beautiful! We could enjoy this houseplant in every room and probably achieve much more success than we do with a gardenia. And, we can benefit from adding the leaves to our salads.

Isn’t it just a matter of perspective? Are they really all that bad? Could we get them declared as the county flower? Could we start to give them places of honour in our vegetation? Could we get excited when the first leaves poke through in the spring? Could we get excited when the first blooms open?

These are all our attitudes with our trilliums. Some of us actually transplant them around our gardens.

I’m just saying. Perhaps it’ll take a politician to get the ball–er, bloom–rolling!

Would sure make a difference to the month of May!