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Comment by cubefox | Hacker News Reader

That's interesting, since Dandelions are wild plants. Basically every vegetable or fruit we eat today (carrots would be pretty close I guess) are cultivated. Usually they hardly resemble their wild ancestor.

I'm surprised Dandelions didn't get cultivated to have much larger roots.

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A hundred years ago, gardeners cultivated dandelions in their garden bed: https://williamrubel.com/2015/04/23/the-history-of-the-garde...

Basil is a cultivated herb that often breaks out of containment and goes wild. Sometimes, people will redomesticate those because the ones that survive the local conditions are well-adapted to the climate.

That's interesting, but it's not clear whether there is any cultivated dandelion species that is substantially different from the wild dandelion.

You might not have to deliberately breed it in any particular way since wild dandelions are already yields something useful for humans.

Yeah but if they'd been bred they would be much more useful. Compare wild carrots to domesticated carrots:

https://www.agefotostock.com/age/en/details-photo/wild-carro...

but wild coconut palms are exactly the same as farmed/domesticated ones. There is no difference between them (atleast until before the green revolution)

Asparagus too!

Apparently wild asparagus and cultivated asparagus are different, although there seem to be also escapees of the cultivated form.

I have a bunch of wild lettuce growing here. They look like dandelions, though they are not, with significantly smaller leaves than cultivated lettuce, a fetid odor, and a slightly bitter taste. But edible raw.

Purslane is another good example. The domesticated ones have larger leaves, but the wild ones are good eating if you know it hasn't been sprayed.

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