What is a dandelion summer?
According to M. C. Beaton, who wrote about it in the cozy mystery, The Skeleton in the Closet (2001), a dandelion summer is a hot summer, foretold by an abundance of dandelion blooms in the spring.
We’ll have to take her word for it because I searched and searched online to confirm a second source1 for this bit of British wisdom but came up with nothing, except for lots of information about dandelion-the-weed, dandelion-the-useful-herb, and a book called Dandelion Summer by Lisa Wingate (2011), which I am now curious enough to read to see if it confirms this definition or has nothing to do with it.
(I see that Dandelion Summer won the 2012 Carol Award for Women’s Fiction from the American Christian Fiction Writers. Well, there goes my plan to name an award after myself.)
Anyway,
M. C. Beaton wrote in her cozy mystery:
“Country people always said when you saw a lot of dandelions, it was going to be a hot summer.” “Dandelion Summer,” said Fell and laughed.
Around here, when people see a lot of dandelions they often think, “Geez, that person doesn’t care about their lawn because they let dandelions grow in it.”
Well, that simply isn’t true in my case. I care about my lawn. It’s just that I’ve planted thousands of crocuses in my lawn for early spring bloom, so I don’t use herbicides to kill off dandelions because those chemicals would kill off the crocuses too. And nobody wants that.
“But the dandelions?!” people ask. “What do you do about dandelions?”
I don’t do anything about them.
Open your eyes in the summer and look around for those dandelions. You don’t see many in bloom in the summertime, do you? I can say from experience that dandelions flower for only a week or two in the spring. Then, if you mow them off and keep your grass cut three inches or taller, they’ll fade away by early summer.
I should clarify. The dandelions will still be there—they are perennial flowers with deep tap roots—but they won’t be flowering. They’ll just be covered up by the lawn.
So even without killing off the dandelions, I think I have a decent enough lawn.
I also have enough dandelions to determine if it’s going to be a dandelion summer, if that bit of country wisdom applies to my area of the world.
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If you’d like to hear me and Dee Nash talk more about lawns, this week’s podcast episode is the one for you. If you’d like to read about my week in the garden, check out my weekly newsletter.
And let me know if you’ve heard of dandelion summers or just think you had a dandelion summer this year.
- I am now a second source if someone searches online for “what is a dandelion summer!” ↩︎