Dandelions and Violets: Wild Edibles Close to Home

My eyes have been opened to the wild, edible greens growing right in my own yard, after attending Let Food Be Thy Medicine: Using Herbs in the Kitchen at Saturday’s Spring Herb and Garden Conference. Herbalist Darcey Blue French of Brighid’s Well Herbs inspired us all by mixing up several delicious recipes for tasting, including an herbal pesto and a weed salad.

I haven’t looked at my “weeds” the same way since, especially those white violets I was cursing a few weeks ago. In fact, I snipped both dandelion greens and violet leaves this evening, along with sorrel, spinach, mizuna and black-seeded Simpson lettuce from my garden. I topped off the greens with chive and viola flowers for a beautiful and delicious spring salad.

Violet leaves are a tonic for the body’s lymph system and are rich in vitamin C. They are a powerful blood purifier. They taste very green, not surprisingly, given their dark, dark green color. Both the leaf and flower are antiseptic, antifungal and anti-inflammatory. Violet leaves have been used to treat asthma, bronchitis, headaches—the list is very long. They are chewy, but not stringy, and are somewhat nutty and spicy in flavor, a nice addition to a mixed green salad.

Dandelion leaves, especially from a young plant, remove toxins from the body. According to a report from the USDA in 1984, dandelion greens ranked among the top most nutritious vegetables. (Why do we not hear more about this?) In addition to purifying the blood, dandelion leaves are good for digestion, promote weight loss, lower serum cholesterol, prevent/lower high blood pressure and more. For a comprehensive summary of the dandelion’s health benefits as well as the related chemical compounds, check out this informative article. Dandelion leaves are bitter in taste (a taste that results from some of its healthful compounds), so it works great in a mixed salad balanced by sweeter greens.

As I puttered around the yard and garden today, I really did look at my lawn and the somewhat untidy beds in a different way. I have a long way to go to be proficient in identifying the many “weeds” in my yard, and I’ll limit my nibbling to the handful I know for sure. I have a great tool that’s perfect for twisting dandelions, root and all, out of the lawn, and I was thinking of using it soon. In fact, I was beating myself up for letting that first crop go to seed.

Now I’m not so sure. My lawn is tiny, having been reduced every year by expanding planting beds. I think I have secretly harbored some fantasy that it will be the green monoculture of a lawn that we’re all supposed to want. I read today in a NOFA (Northeast Organic Farmers Association) publication that lawns, prior to World War II, were diverse carpets of green made up of dozens of different grasses and plants. It was after the war, with the introduction of herbicides and the resulting marketing hype, that we came to love the all-grass, no-weed carpet of a lawn.

I suspect that somewhere along the way it just wasn’t fashionable to speak of the dandelion as the healthy vegetable that it is. I’m not sure how I’ll work this one out in my own little lawn, but I’m suspicious that there could be more out there worth keeping alive.

Hearing and reading about the nutritional and healing qualities of these common plants, it seems so sad that we, as a culture, were so quick to turn away from them.

The best advice of the day, heard from several herbalists, was to choose one plant and know it well. I think I’ve found two worth getting to know and the harvest promises to be continually bountiful.