Sharpless 249 and the Jellyfish Nebula, Image Credit & Copyright: Eric Coles

I hope that you will forgive me this departure into verse, prose, whatever this is…another thread in my life.  I don’t think it is too far amiss, because, after all, horticulture is the ‘art’ and science of growing plants.  Originally I began this as an idea for a children’s story, yes I did, the life of a particular Dandelion, but, probably due to my more recent reading on topics like photosynthesis, cellular metabolism and a biophysics response to the question of, ‘What is life?’…it has morphed…considerably.  When you read this, keep in mind that my intention was to write from the perspective of the Dandelion, a concept pretty incomprehensible to a modern American. 

The Taraxacum Cycle

Stories all begin with a single word, a seed, around which they grow, nurtured over time by the things we all share in common, family, history and experience.  They contain ‘truth’, but are not themselves true, because they must be told in such a way that they lure the reader in and are ‘believable’.  They are organic and grow within us and to the extent that they reflect our own ‘story’, that they meet our expectations, we stay with them and them with us, because there is no story if it is forgotten.  So, the author must manipulate what he knows, he must ‘lie’, to bring you in and keep you, weave truth and lie into a whole.  We take the stories you already know and introduce our own characters, set them in exotic though familiar settings, and, if a writer is good, introduce enough, but not too much, that is ‘new’, different from your cultural experience, your expectation, that you are affected by its unfolding, that you become a part of the story and look at your world in a different way, even if only a little bit.  The word here is Taraxacum. Continue reading →