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God invents a beautiful little flower, a bright yellow reminder of the star which powers all life on our planet, which happens to be edible and tasty. When they go to seed, they turn into little puffballs that my kids pick and use to make their secret wishes. When my dog runs through the yard, she kicks up little clouds of seeds which float gently away on the breeze to spread more little flowers.

And humans are like, "fuck that, I just want grass. God forbid any little flowers should pop up on my lawn."

(disclaimer: I don't mean to shit all over your lawncare - I just find the impulse kind of funny. It's fine that you like a pristine lawn, to each their own).

Im also quite fond of the dandelion for the reasons mentioned, but it's about tidiness.

Tidiness reflects the care and love of the person responsible to his or her surroundings (that is, his environment). Its hard work to weed your lawn, to prune your roses, to edge your sidewalk! Keeping the lawn you painstakingly weeded weed free is a study of grass' lifecycle.

That being said we now have the worst of both worlds. We're lazy and irresponsible but want to pretend we're not to our neighbors, so we hire a bloke to spray poison everywhere. We have lawns where there is no water instead of coming up with a neat yard with more suitable vegetation.

When I was growing up I was so annoyed at my dad who made me pull weeds out by hand with him. Why couldn't we use Round Up like every one else? Now I see the wisdom of his monk-like personality.

It is a social sensibility evolved from an earlier practice where keeping a useless lawn not used for grazing was a sign of wealth.

Now everyone is doing it, and it turned into something expected instead of a sign of wealth long after the truly wealthy moved on to other signals of wealth. People even somehow associate it with an aesthetic. A common justification I have heard are, “I want kids to be able to have some place to play”.

It’s amazing to me how cultural ideas set and ossify.

NoLawns is going mainstream though. There are alternate ground covers (white dutch clover, or even thyme), and people are posting beautiful, tidy, but ecologically resilient and diverse non-lawn landscaping on r/nowlawns.

> It is a social sensibility evolved from an earlier practice where keeping a useless lawn not used for grazing was a sign of wealth.

I'm familiar with the history but this is too reductive. I don't care about those things as evidenced by many other ways I chose (not) to maintain my image with my neighbors. But uniform, healthy, green grass looks nice. To me and many others. I don't even put in that much effort and I dont hate clover, dandelions, etc. I also appreciate the no lawn movement because it reduces maintenance.

A lot of aesthetic senses are more personal preferences, and can change. I, too, used to think that about uniform, healthy, green grass and had the same attitude about minimal effort at maintaining a lawn. But it isn't really set in stone and people's values and aesthetic sense can change. I think many people would be surprised by how much of their own personal preferences are informed and conditioned by culture.

My daughter was quite put out when her teacher awarded extra credit for the students who brought in long dandelions --- they were the first weed which I'd managed to eradicate from our yard (by digging them up by the roots).

Next was the plantains, buckhorn, and uncommon.

The big thing is, eliminating such weeds means that the grass needs to be cut less often, since it's the growth rate of the grass which determines this, which is an important consideration since I use a reel lawnmower.

You have to mow the grass like that because the soil conditions got worse.

Dandelions, for example, thrive in calcium-poor soil conditions. Their deep taproots mine the calcium from below the grass’s root zones and surfaces it up to the leaves. If you don’t harvest the dandelion yourself and “chop and drop them” over the course of several seasons, the soil will have sufficient calcium for other plants to outcompete the dandelion.

In other words, dandelions are pioneer plants, and has a role within ecological succession. They are great for soil building.

You could, of course, just add oyster shells into areas of large numbers of dandelions. But you would not get the benefit of a dandelion breaking up compacted soil.

I too use a reel lawnmower. But I’m slowly turning my front yard into a perennial garden, which is a great hedge against inflation.

What I did was systematically dig out the dandelions and amend the soil with mulch, digging down a shovel length or more and screening the soil to remove all the rocks (and adding more mulch to make up for the volume lost from removing the stones).

Since then we've gotten compost from the township and raked it over the lawn to fill in low spots, and I'd like to think that allow over two decades of grass clippings to mulch in have helped as well.

I also allow the grass around the edges to grow long and cut it by hand w/ clippers, spreading it for birds to make nests of.

Garden areas are my wife's problem.

> Tidiness reflects the care and love of the person responsible to his or her surroundings

This is a very very specific way of demonstrating care and responsibility to environment. It's extremely informed by culture and history and the ecological specifics.

Maybe you didn't intend it but the implication that choices other than tidiness are not loving and responsible is very gross.

> (disclaimer: I don't mean to shit all over your lawncare - I just find the impulse kind of funny. It's fine that you like a pristine lawn, to each their own).

Nah, no offense taken. And I would like to clarify what I mean. I think large swaths of perfectly uniform and healthy grass looks very nice. I even think it's commendable when people put in the time and energy (and gather the knowledge) to maintain their lawn to this high standard. I would say I'm about 1/2 to 2/3rds to that extreme. I can live with some dandelions, clover, a few bare spots, etc. I find you need to increase effort exponentially to maintain a lawn to a high standard. So I commiserate with the "no-lawn" movement from a "remove things that need maintenance" perspective.

I also think people have lots of unknown biases when it comes to lawns. In particular geography. I live somewhere pretty green. I'm on well water. For all intents and purposes water is a free, unlimited resource for me. I think many people here are from west coast or even just cities so they come to this discussion with the assumption that water is scarce.

> but seeing large patches of them after going to seed dont look good

This seems like the primary metric we as a society use for assessing plants as weed or desirable. I wonder if it is the right metric or whether we should start with the environmental impact (and what metrics would make this assessment, like impact to pollinators, etc).

“The cinnamon can be eaten, and so it gets cut down; the lacquer tree can be used, and so it gets hacked apart. All men know the use of the useful, but nobody knows the use of the useless!” — ZhuangzI

Yeah weeds are just plants that most people tend to not want but tend to thrive.

> Another thing I remember is that he says there are accounts in China of roots getting much longer. 10+ feet IIRC, compared to 2 claimed in this article. Although that's a bit hard to believe.

Have you ever seen the lengths people go to for pumpkin competitions? I fully believe that people committed to the cause could grow 10' dandelion roots. Tons of fertilizer, optimized "sun" exposure, repeat for generations and propagate the seeds from the record-setters.

Most lawn weeds were brought here as food. One obvious exception is buttercups, which are poisonous.