Dandelion days are here again

‘April brings the sweet spring showers, On and on, for hours and hours.’ Lines written by Michael Flanders in ‘A Song of the Weather’ in 1956, writes Dick Warner

Of course, he was writing about English weather but Ireland’s weather in April is at least as fickle. However, one of the sweet spring showers eventually ended and a patch of blue sky rolled in. When the sunshine struck the wet field outside the window there was a sudden explosion of golden yellow — a sea of dandelions.

Dandelions are one of those flowers that close at night or in dull weather but open when the sun shines. A field full of them can look green and within a minute turn yellow. Everyone knows what a dandelion looks like, or, at least, they think they do. They belong to the genus Taraxacum and, according to DA Webb in his classic An Irish Flora, written in 1977, this is “a very difficult genus of a multitude of forms, which set seed without pollinating, and never, therefore, interbreed”.