Pleasant Talk About Fruits, Flowers and Farming

by Henry Ward Beecher

I am moved to celebrate this brilliant, and yet, I fear, not much-prized flower, from the glory of my morning view.

Out of my back windows I look down on four or five grassy yards, all well kept and lying well open to the sun. Soon after the grass springs you may see such a gorgeous array of dandelions as might make a florist fairly envious! They jut out from the edges of the walks, they crowd the narrow strips of grass at the lower end, they fairly jostle each other like a crowd pouring out of a public hall, in their strife to get into the light and open their golden crowns to the sun.

So brilliant are they and so hardy, that we are apt to miss the sentiment that lives in them. They are not of the flowers that impudently push themselves forward, demanding us to look at them whether we will or no. With all their amazing brilliancy, they are still coy love-flowers, that wait for the sun, as a bride for the bridegroom. For dandelions do not wake up in the morning before we do. They wait till the sun has long called them, and then they fling open their golden disks, and shine with a real delight of existence, with a cheer and abundance which ought to strike joy into the heart of a misanthrope.

Soon after noon is at its highest, the dandelion, thinking that the world is bright enough, and that the sun can manage the rest of the day, folds itself up, laces the golden filaments with the green lepals, and retires to meditation. Thus it plays courtier in the morning, and nun in the afternoon.

But what a name! Dens leonis! or Dent-de-lion! Or, if you fly to the systematic name,—the harsh Taraxacum! Shall such a home-loving, radiant creature be called Lion’s Tooth, because some impertinent, prying botanist fancied that he had espied the shape of a lion’s tooth in its minor forms?

Just as soon as we have got politics settled, business reformed, and human nature elevated, I am determined to form a society for the reformation of botanical names. Botany has been the Noah’s Ark of pedants. Every absurd

whim of every pragmatical professor has been turned into Greek or Latin, and hung about the neck of unhappy flower. One might as well hang a dictionary around a child’s neck by way of ornament, as to impose on flowers such outrageous and outlandish names as now defend the science of botany from all approach, as a fort is defended by a line of chevaux-de-frise.

But blessings on those cheery children of the sun! They are born of brightness; their whole life is like a smile of love. They are not a flower for the hand; they are not to be worn in the bosom. They do not love the house, or the pressure of a close bouquet. Their life is in the free open air. They shine out on you along your daily walk. They crowd your yard with golden coin, which, good for nothing in the market, may yet have the power to confer more enjoyment than could golden dollars or ducats.

This is my annual tribute. To-day I look out of my window, and thank God for the gifts which he sends me by the hand of Dandelions! Do they know my thoughts as I gaze on them? Is there not some sympathy between things in nature which wake up the soul to delight, and aid the soul thus aroused? Behind signs and signals, back of all articulate utterance, may there not be a subtler relationship which will yet be discovered, as connecting the inward and the outward with a living relationship?