Keywords: disability, weeds, care, ecology
Abstract
This paper traces the ways in which the Common Dandelion, their ecologies, and histories lead to a trans*ecological understanding of care. Through three meditations and an accompanying photo essay, my relationship with Dandelions on a West Virginia mountain demonstrates the outlines of settler colonial logics of race and space and ability—while simultaneously revealing the ways that Dandelions offer care in their weedy refusal of those hierarchies. I begin with an ecological analysis of Dandelions in the place of this Appalachian Mountain and the space of lawns in the United States, pointing to the ways in which their weedy presence is a trans* refusal of boundaries and binaries. The question of “weed” takes me to that of “invasive,” and I turn to Indigenous and non-binary ways of being and knowing to trouble my own tending practices on this mountain as I care for slopes overrun with Bull Thistles. This leads me to an exploration of ecosystems of care: navigating a disabling genetic condition through a pandemic and a medical industrial system that reinforces the eradication of disability, my bodymind consistently reminds me of its fragile and changing boundaries. My bodymind consistently reminds me that relationships with plants are the origins of medicine—that plants are the lifesource of this planet, that without plants humans do not exist. That without the medicine of Dandelions, my body becomes a little more precarious. Weedy refusals turn to trans*ecological care through an analysis of pain and interdependence that entangles disability studies, trans* studies, and herbalism. The biopolitics of Dandelions confront the conceptual boundaries of futurity, of what it means to be a body, and of how we are in relationship with the world around us, through a story of disturbance and relative abundance; a story of medicine and dis/ability and pharmaceutical industries; a story of property and the aesthetics of space. What might these stories of Dandelions teach us about the possibilities of care?
Looking for Dandelions, Finding Trans*ecologies of Care
Last year, I moved to a rural West Virginia mountain, where I now live with my service dog and the plants and river and mountain. Cleo Wolfe Hazard states, “When cishet-settler worlds reject us and our deviant relations, queer and trans people often find solace in connection to nonhuman ecologies and the world” (Wolfe Hazard 2022, 20). And I think of how, as a trans and immunocompromised person with a disability, when the politics of this country rejected my existence at every turn, I ran back to the mountains of my childhood. I ran to this mountain, settled along the Allegheny Front somewhere up Spruce Knob, a not-too-far drive away from the rural queer artist mountain town that has become a second home as I work on a research project about Dandelions. [1].
Figure 1. The view from my mountain house, with the eastern ridge just below the full moon. A second slope is behind the eastern ridge, with the valley and another mountain ridge in the background. All are lush, green forest. The sky at dusk has layers of blue and pink and barely yellow, that fade into gray blue. The full moon has barely risen above the mountain ridges, and sits in the pinky layer of the sky to the far right of the image. Photo by author.
The small weed planted themself in my mind a few years ago as I turned toward a study of medicinal plants. When I came across them in Mary Siisip Geniusz’s Anishinaabe plant teachings, Plants Have So Much To Give Us, All We Have to do is Ask (2015), I had known them my whole life yet never before heard of their medicine. As I began searching for their stories, they became central to mine. When I look for them, they appear.
Joshua Whitehead writes, “I wilt my pain into nutrient,” (2022, 3) and I think of the Dandelion rosettes of fanged leaves that pull nutrients up through their taproot, to condense them in their being, to eventually let them wilt into the soil just underfoot. I now ask my neighbor Dandelions, “how can I wilt this pain into nutrient?” Every day I walk this mountain, practicing listening for their answers. This paper offers the answers, though neither definitive norexhaustive, that recognizing Dandelions as my neighbors and teachers has given me. I start by examining the dynamics of space and place through the practice of looking for Dandelions on a mountain in Appalachia and in lawns across the United States, pointing to the ways in which their weedy presence is one of trans* refusal. The question of “weed” takes me to the question of “invasive” in a meditation on Dandelions and Bull Thistles that decenters the colonial binary of “good” and “bad” plants through the physical act of tending to this mountain. The trans*ecologies that emerge through looking for and tending to Dandelions lead me to a more expansive ecosystem of care. I offer these trans*ecologies of care as ways of being and being in relationship that attend to the entanglement of settler colonialism, ableism, and environmental destruction.
Looking for Dandelions
My little mountain house sits on a slope and creek and ridge that is collectively owned by my family and a few others, though I am currently the only full-time human resident and caretaker of this land, this forest, this property. The only road to this side of Spruce Knob cuts through our parcel of land, parallel to the creek and the ridge. The western side of the road is a patchwork of forest and meadow and driveways and homes; the eastern side is an older but still quite young forest with overgrown former logging roads and trails; the creek and a narrow valley gorge cut between the two slopes.
Figure 2. (left) A photo of the creek that runs between the eastern and western slopes. A small stream of water can be seen in the middle of the image, running over small mossy rocks and banked by ferns under a canopy of trees. Photo by author.
Figure 3. (below) A small herd of cows lay in a meadow on the western slope in the foreground, with some calves standing in the grass; the road and forest on the eastern slope can be seen in the background. The blue sky with white fluffy clouds can be seen above the ridge line. Photo by author.
This mountain was once old growth forest. This mountain was clear cut by logging companies in the 1910s—any remaining old growth at that point turned to bare earth (Clarkson 1964). When my late neighbor bought this land in 1973, the sheep farm that resided here used the slopes for grazing and there was still no forest. It is only since 1973 that the forest has been ushered back and allowed to regrow by their human inhabitants. Since then, the western and eastern slopes of this land have been used by humans in dramatically different ways and have thus developed different ecological communities in their recovery. With houses and driveways and cows that come to graze here, there are small apple orchards and continued drastic environmental intervention on the western slope. The most recent of such destruction and disturbance was the construction of the house I now live in. I am still finding and collecting and cleaning up construction debris. I am still seeding steep bare slopes around the house, watering on dry days in hopes that seedlings will grow to hold the rust orange clay soil in place.
Every day I walk this mountain. I follow the driveways and paths on the western slope, tending as I go. I follow former logging roads on the eastern slope as I learn the landscape, as I learn my new home. On both slopes, I look for my neighbors that I know by name and check on their changes with each passing day, with the seasons, with rain or drought. Early spring has developed new meaning since I began to actively look for Dandelions. This was my first spring on the mountain, and as the snow melted and warmer days crept into my bones, I looked for the first signs of jagged leaves and yellow flowers. As I watched them grow big and tall in construction disturbance, small and close to the ground on older driveways not recently disturbed, I began to notice where they are and where they aren’t on this mountain. In short: Dandelions are prevalent on the parts of the western slope most disturbed by humans, and for the most part absent elsewhere.
This noticing did not happen in the walking, but rather in the in-between of step and breath. When breath becomes ragged, steps falter, tremors begin, body and being having been somehow dragged into another dimension, and I must get close to the ground, quickly. When I am required to sit or lie on the driveway, the forest floor, the moss covered rocks, and wait. To distract from the reeling realities of nausea, lightheadedness, and tremors, I turn to my neighbors who are here with me, now. The Monarch butterfly that lands on a Thistle nearby, the Chicory in the ditch next to me, the outline of a Red-tailed Hawk flying above me against the blue sky, the rustle of the Black Locust Trees as a breeze comes down the mountain, the songs of the American Robin, Eastern Towhee, Baltimore Oriole, Black-capped Chickadee that fall from nearby Lichen-covered trees and tangles of brush. I try to ignore that where I needed to stop this time is closer to the Bobcat’s den than I’d like to be.
Figure 4. (right) The large Dandelion plant that sits just outside my front door is in the middle of the image, with many stems reaching upward, some that are long-gone puffballs and others that are still yellow flowers. The out of focus background shows my driveway, some trees, and the ridgeline with just a sliver of gray sky. Photo by author.
Figure 5. (left) A close up of moss and lichen on the eastern slope. This particular image is textures of green, with light green cup lichen, more flaky crust-like lichen, and multiple kinds of spikey mosses. Photo by author.
Figure 6. (right) Another close up of moss, lichen, and fungi on the eastern slope. This one shows textures of light teal lichen, with tiny light pink mushrooms popping up in clusters. Tiny fern-like moss and other leaves also make up this textural assemblage. Photo by author.
The Dandelion plant just outside my front door is the largest I have ever known, with stems that reached 26 inches long this summer and over 50 flowers at one time. Those on older, less traveled driveways, are comparatively tiny—similar in embodiment to those I have known in suburban lawns and city sidewalks. But when I walk up the mountain from my house, into the forest, they quickly disappear, the Soil there instead home to Cleavers, Mist Flower, Nettles, and some invasive species: Multiflora Rose, Japanese Honeysuckle, Garlic Mustard. When I walk the logging roads on the eastern slope, I look for them under my feet or next to my resting place and find instead Mosses and Lichen and Ferns and Fungi and forest detritus. I find instead Black Trumpet and Reishi mushrooms, Mountain Laurels, Mayapples, and lots of White Tailed Deer droppings.
This is perhaps to say: Dandelions are both a (if not the) quintessential North American weed and simultaneously, in different contexts or to different people, not at all a weed. At its most basic definition, a “weed” is a plant growing where a human does not want it to grow. Perhaps my favorite of the many definitions of “weed” is that of W.S. Blatchley from 1912: “A plant which contests with man for the possession of the soil” (Zimdahl 2018, 18) [2]. It is only in recent history that Dandelions were characterized as a plant fighting for possession of the soil. Brought intentionally by European colonizers in the 17th century [3], Dandelions were considered difficult to cultivate in North American gardens at the time, but were prized for their beauty, food, and medicine. They are now widely known as weeds due to their resilient presence in the contexts of lush green turfgrass lawns and cracks in asphalt and concrete. They have become weeds in the past two centuries as the ideal of a uniform lawn or a greenless sidewalk became a naturalized norm and symbol enforced through homeowners associations, city ordinances, and social pressure.
Historians of lawns trace the monocrop turf lawn to European aristocracy and their manicured gardens [4]—which is undoubtedly true—but when contextualizing the upper class in the United States adopting the practice of having a lawn, the ecological, political, and social contexts of racial slavery and Native dispossession are central. This country, founded through economic colonies by European companies, relied (and continues to rely) on the accumulation of wealth through stolen land and labor. Historically, a turf lawn around a plantation house was a signifier of status not only because it mimics the aristocratic European conventions of the time, but also because it is a use of land that reifies cultural practices of whiteness through exploitation [5]. Using a parcel of land for lawn rather than food was a statement of luxury—choosing to seed the land with European turf grasses was an investment, economically, aesthetically, and ecologically, in European colonization. In this spatial moment, Indigenous plants and people are dispossessed, Europeans claim possession through imported plants cultivated by the labor of enslaved people, and all the while the soil is being exploited and the scope and scale of life is dramatically altered [6].
It is from this context that the aesthetic and economic investment in lawns began in the United States. “While the lawn is of course a fundamental product of American imagination—a symbol—it is also a vast and coercive economy. More specifically, monocultural lawn cultivation imposes a set of economic relationships between grasses, weeds, chemicals, companies, and people” (Robbins 2007, xvii). An economic investment turned national colonial project, lawns and lawn care were advertised endlessly, a “need” imposed onto consumers, eventually spreading to the middle class and turning into an aesthetic responsibility for homeowners that symbolizes domestic values, good domestic management, good citizenship, heteropatriarchal family values, national belonging, and whiteness.
Figure 7: A large Dandelion plant on the western slope takes up nearly all of the image. The picture shows the plant from above, with its stems snaking toward the viewer. Many are what remains after the seeds are gone, but a handful are still yellow flowers. Big toothed leaves can be seen around the stems at the base of the plant. Photo by author.
Figure 8: This picture shows a lone Dandelion on a bare orangey-brown steep slope close to the house. The Dandelion has one lone flower stem, that curves upwards and ends in a closed flower on the verge of turning into a puffball. The bare slope surrounds it, fading into blurry greenery at the top of the image. Photo by author.
Figure 9: A small Dandelion plant pushing through the gravel on the new driveway. The small Dandelion plant in the center of the image, surrounded entirely by gravel. The plant has small, toothed leaves, and one lone yellow flower head that leans out to the right. Photo by author.
A project in defining “correct” ways of using land and the “correct” aesthetics of land, lawns produce spaces that reify colonialism and that perpetuate paternal colonial narratives of taming land and nature and wilderness. A project in ecological destruction, lawns construct narratives of which bodies belong in which spaces—a project in whiteness, lawns construct neighborhoods as spaces of conformity and security by reinforcing conceptions of private property. Lawns signify security and control and beauty because they signify paternal whiteness. Lawns call humans into different relationships with space, with state, with political economies. Lawns call humans into different relationships with their nonhuman neighbors, plants and animals alike. But Dandelions are bodies out of place and time—bodies who disrupt and disturb the perceived human control over nature.
Dandelions, as weeds, as nuisances, as pests, are narrated as such because of their abundance. But abundance is relative—and even one Dandelion in a green lawn might be considered “abundant” because they are deemed to be out of place, because they are seen as useless, and because they do not fit the aesthetic of a velvety green carpeted lawn. And Dandelions are not a “pioneer species” that thrives in just any disturbed soil—they thrive in particularly human-caused disturbance. They are a footprint species, following colonizers in their wheel-ruts across the continent (Crocker 2018, 106-111). Without the human, and perhaps particularly the European-American colonial interventions into the North American landscape like lawns or logging, Dandelions would not be so abundant in this continent’s landscape. Useless weed becomes vilified invader through the colonial project of space construction and control—despite colonizers being invaders themselves, who intentionally brought the Dandelions with them because of the plant’s utility.
This particular slope of Spruce Knob does not have a lawn, but my neighbors down the road can be heard mowing theirs every week. I instead have a recent construction site—and the human disturbance in both environments is aligned with European-American settler-colonial practices rooted in a distinction and hierarchy of human over nature. The place of Spruce Knob and the space of lawns in the United States may seem like disparate entities, but Dandelions entangle them as they show up to do the work of rebuilding after deforestation or construction or mowing. Dandelions show up in this place and these spaces, doing the work of refusal, the work of resistance and repair: “Other-than-human beings can also resist enclosure and damage caused by settler-colonial actions” (Wolfe Hazard 2022, 8). They become vilified invader as their root systems reveal the permeability of the colonial practice of calling this land “lawn,” calling that tree “timber,” calling this flower “weed.”
Lawncare and construction and logging are practices of purification—just as a colonial gender binary is meant to limit, control, and purify the possibilities of gender formation, these environmental interventions are meant to limit, control, and purify the possibilities of life. Dandelions, from this trans*ecological perspective, are continually teaching lessons in refusal and care, whether or not it is wanted or reciprocated by human property owners.
The logic [7] and practices of lawns and land management, the logic and practices of logging and resource extraction, rely on an assumption of bounded spaces and individual bodies with clear and reliable boundaries. But the specificity of Dandelions reveals these boundaries to be illusions, and precarious ones at best; “Figures of cutting/cutting across/crossing boundaries are resonantly transy figures” (Wolfe Hazard 2022, 105). As a transy figure, Dandelions transgress against the human concept of the neatly delineated body in space, against the lawn and the sidewalk—but not against their interdependent ecological relations. They do not transgress against the plants, the animals, the mountain. As a “pioneer species,” their presence in lawns or on this mountainous construction site is an attempt to reintroduce a more biodiverse ecosystem, their roots and leaves paving the way for other plants.
Dandelions have a balance of shallow, wide spreading roots and a taproot that grows downwards over the years and can go down fifteen feet. This combination not only enables them to grow in disturbed environments, it benefits other beings in the ecosystem; “Their wide-spreading roots loosen hard-packed soil, aerate the earth and help reduce erosion. The deep taproot pulls nutrients such as calcium from deep in the soil and makes them available to other plants. Dandelions actually fertilize the grass” (Sanchez 2007, n.p.). Their rosette of leaves spread out circularly, parallel to the soil, lying flat in such a way that avoids lawn mowers. In such a way that allows old leaves to die and contribute their high nutrient density nearly directly back into the earth beneath them. They nourish the plants around them, drawing nutrients up to the surface, and decomposing into nutrient-rich topsoil when their leaves die. Although they don’t rely on pollination by other beings, “85 different insects are nourished by dandelions, including butterflies, wasps, flies, and beetles. Bees love it—dandelion is an important plant for honey production” (Mars 1999, 13).
Figure 10. (left) A bee feeds from a Dandelion on the western slope. The dandelion flower takes up most of the image, with the bee perched right on top, their head buried in the flower. Blurred gravel is in the background, and a closed Dandelion bud can be seen just below the yellow flower. Photo by author.
Figure 11. (right) A Dandelion puffball grows tall out of a ditch on the western slope. The photo shows the greenery of the ditch, a texture of many different plants, with one lone, long Dandelion stem ending in a puffball in the center of the image. Photo by author.
Figure 12. (left) A Monarch butterfly on a Bull Thistle. The background is blurred, with only the Butterfly and Thistle flower in focus in the foreground. The Thistle is a bright purple, with the flower fully open and the Monarch perched right on top, wings fully open to show their orange and cream and black design. Photo by author.
Perhaps their presence is both restorative and generative, one example among many of beings refusing assertions of the monoculture; “The bodies of both disabled and chronically ill people and restored prairies resist the impulse toward and the reality of monocultures” (Clare 2017, 215). The bodies of Dandelions and trans* people alike resist the impulse toward and the reality of monocultures, too. This mountain is not restored forest, it is not “a return to the past nor a promise to the future, although it may hold glimmers of both” (Clare 2017, 187). In the glimmers of past, present, and promises to the future whispered into the wind, I find myself here, again, walking the mountain. Seven Turkey Vultures glide through this little valley between the eastern and western slopes where I live, their massive wingspans black against a cloudless blue sky. And I wade through tall spring grasses filled with Dandelion puffballs, what yesterday was a sea of yellow, an inkling of what this might become.
The yellow flowers in turfgrass lawns are held in transition; in a continual state of being in-between, trapped in a never-ending effort to build toward something that never arrives in the confines of the front lawn as they are routinely dug up or mowed down. And yet, they reappear. They show up in the driveway and on steep bare orange clay slopes, winding their taproots deep into the mountain to hold it in place. Cows eat them back to just the smallest green nubs above the surface of the earth. And yet, they reappear. Soon the Common Plantain joins them, and perhaps Yarrow, too. My dog nudges me and I am once again lying on the ground. I watch the small Butterflies flitting between the Dandelions in the ditch of my driveway, I hear a Bee buzz to one on the slope closeby, slowly lulled back to this bodily dimension by the songs of the Goldfinch and Bluebirds and the occasional gobble of the Wild Turkey.
Dandelions are animate [8] beings whose sphere of influence extends beyond their fifteen-foot roots. And the turf lawn, mowed to a uniform three inches, while it might have a fence or a property line that surrounds it, does not care for these arbitrary human delineations. I feel the boundaries of my own bodymind [9] slipping away from me the deeper I delve into the ecologies of Dandelions. There is “a sort of vertiginous joy at being unable either to turn back or to continue as before; new ways, transways, transselves are required of us here” (Wolfe Hazard 2022, 105). The more I look for Dandelions, the more my body melts into the mountainside. There is no perfect ecological equilibrium. There is only transition and change and we are always already in the middle of it.
There’s a sprout in my heart:
Somewhere between the pit in my stomach and the scar across my sternum lies a seedling of what could be. The making of a body is a continual effort, a never ending project whether it’s acknowledged or not. My top surgery scar is a year healed thick line across my sternum that once was thin but has since grown, expanding as my disordered connective tissues weave themselves together again over sore ribs and shallow breath.
My connective tissues lack the passive tension required of a human body, leaving muscles sore from the weight of my bones and joints loose without their necessary support. The making of a body is in the rituals of breath, lungs stretching ribs until back muscles spasm, I tire of holding myself upright. Every breath is a making.
The making of a body is an ecological endeavor; the residual expression of you and I but also we and they. Because, as Brenda Iijima writes, “Bodies are about and between bodies—that is to say, bodies extend beyond physical selves” (2010, 276). That is to say the making of this body is a making of this forest, of this creek, of this mountain. Every day I walk this mountain, nestled somewhere up Spruce Knob in the Monongahela Forest across the valley from the Allegheny Front in the Appalachian mountains, greeting my neighbors as I learn their names; Shagbark Hickory, Black Locust, Sweet Williams, Eastern Redbud, Colt’s Foot, Wallflower, Docks.
Some I have known for years already; Dandelion and Tulip Poplar and Plantain and Sweetbay Magnolia and Mountain Laurel and Yarrow, though I have only known those that reside on this particular slope of this mountain for little more than a year. I greet, though never hope to meet others: Bobcat and Rattlesnake and Coyote and Black Bear. This is all perhaps to say that as I tend this mountain, weeding and planting and walking and breathing and lying on the ground, it is a making of bodies as generative as it is destructive.
I have become protective of my neighbor Dandelions on these slopes, saying hello to them as I note their changes with the seasons and sun. I pull the Bull Thistle that resides nearby, not wanting them to crowd out the Dandelions but more importantly knowing if they are still there when my father visits, he will spray with herbicide and every time this happens the sprout in my heart aches. Spraying a biocide, a life-killer, in the name of biodiversity. I feel the illogic in every fiber of my disordered connective tissue, a wrenching around my organs.
Figure 13. (right) A Thistle bud just before opening into a flower. The bud is in the center, and the only part of the image in focus. It is pictured close-up and from above, with circles of green spikes tipped in purple surrounding a center that is a deep, dark purple. The background is blurred, but an open purple Thistle flower can be seen in the top left corner. Photo by author.
Figure 14. (left) A stand of Bull Thistle with the neighboring ridge in the background. The Thistle plant is in the foreground, in a grass meadow, with many small purple flowers and white seedy puffs. The background shows a small forested mountain, with a rocky ridge cutting diagonally across its face. The sky above the mountains is fully overcast and light gray. Photo by author.
Figure 15. (right) A Bull Thistle growing tall, with some flowers turning to seeds, on the western slope. The spikey plant is in the foreground and in focus, with long spikes up their stem and on the tips of their leaves. The flower heads are in various stages of development, some fully open and purple, some closing and a straw-yellow tinged purple as they turn to seeds, others only beginning to open. The blurred background is the gentle slope of a mountain side, a texture of meadow and forest, with a gray overcast sky above. Photo by author.
Though both weeds, one is tucked away in my heart beside the sprout. Though it’s the language I reach for, English doesn’t readily hold the complexity of non-binary existence, of the existence of this body. Which is to say, of a heart full of Dandelions and a fist full of Bull Thistle and a thick scar of intervention between the two. Iijima reminds me, “Language enacts. Language is a biological function as much as it is a technology” (2010, 281).
Kerri ní Dochartaigh asks, “What do we do when we name a thing? We carry it from there to here — from then to now — we make room for it in a place deep inside our being” (2022, 149).
To call Dandelions and Bull Thistle weeds is to call them plants out of place, out of time. It is to assert where they belong according to humans in this place, in this moment. It is to assert a native/non-native binary that adheres to colonial timescapes. Jonathan Skinner writes, “Weeds are nature ungirded, beyond the germ and girth of the gardener’s hand—the negation of enclosure…. From the standpoint of weeds, even ‘wilderness areas’ are a type of human gardening” (2010, 30). Dandelions and Bull Thistle maintain that whether I protect or pull them, they share in the making of this body. This body does not end at fingertips or cell walls, does not begin with a naming.
“Dandelion and plantain… while considered “weedy”… pose no real threat to biodiversity or cause other negative ecological impacts” (Reo & Ogden 2018, 1428). The Bull Thistles, on the other hand, are stubborn to leave once they have arrived, and readily spread in ways named invasive. Laws in Nebraska when my father grew up a farm boy gave fines for not removing them. Large stands of them live across the slope around my house on this mountain, and if left to live as they do, the slope would quickly be nearly all but Bull Thistle and trees.
I learned the names of those neighbors called invasive early in life; Garlic Mustard, Honeysuckle, Kudzu, English Ivy, Mimosa, Bradford Pear. With each learning, a story of disdain and hatred for those plants grew. Layers of learning “good” plants from “bad” a teaching of who belongs where, of who gets to decide the belonging. I also learned to classify Dandelions as weeds early in life; I didn't quite understand the nuance between weed and invasive. Digging up Dandelions from my suburban backyard was analogous to summer campaigns with trash bags to eradicate Garlic Mustard from Appalachian mountains to my small eight year-old hands.
The making of a body is a slow accumulation. Ligaments and tendons demand a crawling, life can only germinate so fast and there will always be more Bull Thistle or Garlic Mustard to pull. In the creeping is a hesitation, the question of weed or non-native or invasive a wave that swells as hands in gardening gloves break their rhythm. Nicholas Reo and Laura Ogden remind me, “In contrast to the predominant perspectives in invasive species management and research, being new to an area, human-introduced, or even leading to environmental change does not make an animal or plant unwelcome or inherently bad. Plants and animals move and migrate, and these migrations are not inherently good or bad” (Reo & Ogden 2018, 1427). Every name is a making.
Kerri ní Dochartaigh asks, “What do we do when someone takes away the names of those things we have named? When we lose the words for what we hold dear?” (2022, 149).
In the colonial “invasive land ethic” (Reo & Ogden 2018, 1429) that commands every you and I be a separate being with separate bodies, my year-healed scar across my sternum marks me out of place, out of time while my white skin shields me from another wake. Politicians clamor for the eradication of the non-binary, laying bare the precarious fragility of the naming. If Dandelions are only weeds because of an aesthetic harm as yellow interrupting a lawn of green, what is it to be a bright light in a field of conformity? Narrowing the name to a lawn thins the diversity of bodies and being, turning wildflowers to grass and Dandelions from medicine to weed.
Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasomasake Simpson whisper to me: “And yet. There is knowledge in us that runs deeper, even if some of us are more practised at ignoring it. It is less recognizable, yet it flows as a continuous stream, if only we will hear it” (2022, 245). Understanding that English does not enable non-binary thinking and being, I search for other words and other ways. The making of this body an anti-colonial weedy project as boundaries blur and binaries break. Every day I walk this mountain, making this body in the spaces between you and I and we and they. Breath and step a lulling of the ache of tissue, learning to listen to the plants is learning to listen to this body. I find myself on the ground again, the smell of Soil guiding me back once more.
I have been learning to distinguish Thistles, learning their names and their ways of being on this slope. I have been telling my father: these here are not invasive, they are native Thistles, and this is how to recognize them. He has started calling the native Thistles my friends. Perhaps one day the herbicide bottles will be thrown away, never to be used on this mountain again.
Figure 16. (left) A native Thistle (they are hard to tell apart). One flower is the focal point of the image. The purple of this flower is slightly different than the other images, less fuschia tones and more lavender ones. The bulb under the flower also shows vertical white lines in the center of each bract. To the left of the flower, the rest of the plant can be seen slightly out of focus, with spikes and leaves and other flowers. The mountain horizon is the blurred background on the right side of the picture, with the top third left to the cloudy gray sky (I promise we have clear sunny days too). Photo by author.
Figure 17. (right) A close up of a Dandelion seed puffball with the driveway in the background. The puffball takes up the entire image, with each seed in focus as some of them have just begun to fall off. The background is blurred gravel and gray sky. Photo by author.
Figure 18. (left) A half-opened Dandelion flower sits in the left-center of the image. The yellow petals have begun to emerge from the right side of the bud, with the left side still fully closed. The flower is surrounded by textured spikey leaves and orange-brown soil. Photo by author.
As I pull the Bull Thistle from the rust orange clay of this mountain, I thank them for holding the earth, for paving the way for others, and I ask them to forgive me, to leave now to make way for the native seeds I am planting. I believe in using everything I take from this land but I have not yet found a use for Bull Thistle. No sooner than those words appear on the page, I realize I have not tried to. Their spines and needles protecting their green fibers digging through gloves and pricking my wrists as I pull them from the earth, in my adherence to invasive logics and ideologies and names, I did not ask what their gifts might be. I did not go looking to learn otherwise.
I’m a descendant of German Mennonites, which is to say my ancestors were the right kind of “other”: religiously persecuted but white-skinned. As a new caretaker of this land and this mountain, I look to the ways of being with my more-than-human neighbors from those who have been practicing reciprocity for millenia. Turning away from “invasive ideologies,” I question the impulse to eradicate Bull Thistles for the simple mistake of growing where my family does not want them. I look to learn from Indigenous caretakers and scientists: “Anishnaabe elders… often feel strongly that nature finds its own balance, and people should not intervene using chemicals or other drastic management techniques” (Reo & Ogden 2018, 1427). To continue a practice of drastic intervention would be to continue acting under the logic that the ecology must be tamed, controlled, or otherwise managed by human hands. Environmental restoration threatens to continue cycles of colonial destruction when steeped in the same logics that assert hierarchies of bodily animacy and value—those that result in Indigenous dispossession and environmental racism, privileging profits over lives.
Perhaps a level of this story of ecological restoration is still true, in order to protect endangered neighbors. But my hands in gardening gloves break their rhythm, my stride staggers as I turn toward a different way of being with not just my neighbor Dandelions, but perhaps my neighbor Bull Thistles, too. Taking care of this mountain and weeding, as reciprocal practices, require acknowledgement of the animacy, interdependence, and interconnectedness of all living beings; “Plants, animals, humans, stones, the land, all share the same breath” (Salmón 2000, 1328).
Watering new seeds into the earth, I hope to see Echinacea and Butterfly Weed in a few weeks alongside the Sumac and Yarrow and Mountain Mint and Dandelions; “Or is there no return, no restoration, no cure, but rather acceptance, resistance, building anew amidst this dense thicket?” (Clare 2017, 166). The making of a body is in the tending and leaving untended. There’s a sprout in my heart; a seedling of what could be.
Finding Trans*ecologies of Care
Asking my neighbor Dandelions, “How can I wilt this pain into nutrient?” is not asking for a melting away of the chronic or acute pain in my tendons, ligaments, muscles, joints. It is not to say that pain is or becomes nourishment, nor is it a gift, nor is it laden with inherent profound meaning or purpose. It is perhaps to say that it is the questions I ask of my pain that might lead toward thinking pain otherwise. It is perhaps to say that it is the questions I ask of Dandelions that might lead toward being otherwise, in a body in pain.
Eli Clare reminds me, “The ideology of cure would have us believe that whole and broken are opposites and that the latter has no value” (2017, 159). Untangling my connective tissue from the ideology of cure, I loosen the threads of the story of pain as suffering. Because sometimes it is. But suffering is not all that pain is. Joshua Whitehead writes, “Feel the roots of me, an ecosystem of pain” (2022, 1-2). Acknowledging that this life is riddled with memories and experiences of pain is to pick up those memories and moments; to pick up the never-ending waves of grief and mourning and choose to marvel at the tenderness. Every day I walk this mountain, when the waves of grief and mourning become a current without tether, I sit with rocks and trees. When my autonomic system falters, I lie on Soil with plants and insects. The old growth that used to live here cuts a pit in my gut—a cavern built of flesh and disordered tissue to hold the immense care and heartache I feel for all of the massacres past and present on this mountain. For all the Trees and Beavers and Wolves and Bison and Elk and people these hills and hollers were home to.
The ideology of cure is entangled with the ideology of eradication—lessons in who belongs where and what it means to be a body that leave me in the never-ending grief of mass extinction. I turn towards Trans Vitality:
"[Capitalism’s] discourses prevent, rather than facilitate, a grounded celebration of desire lines, of explorations of livable life, of the unimaginable possibilities in approaching all life as sacred. What I am proposing is, instead, a profound and radical disinvestment of hierarchies of worth" (Edelman 2020, 12).
Declaring Dandelions weeds, even declaring Bull Thistle invasive, are statements of worth along a hierarchy that is arbitrary yet common sense in the ideologies of capitalism and settler colonialism. But the ideology of restoration is also entangled with the ideology of eradication—lessons in which beings may be massacred for the sake of greater life (biodiversity), and what it means to be a body that has never known a before disability. It is these hierarchies of worth that limit who gives or receives care, where we look for care, and how we define what shape care might take. It is these hierarchies of worth, often though not always along animacy hierarchies, that claim the lives of plants are not sacred—that Dandelions and Bull Thistle are not as alive as you or I.
The sound of mowing takes over this sunny summer Saturday afternoon on the mountain; sound travels differently through mountain peaks and valleys and they are miles away yet sound as if they are just here. Another day or perhaps that very same day shots ring out as another neighbor or perhaps the very same neighbor is hunting or just practicing the act of killing for fun. Joshua Whitehead’s words become a rudder.
"The grass has been recently cut and there are severed tubes of plants splayed in front of me; I turn my eyes away because I have endured enough massacres in my lifetime. I’m sorry I let the weeds eat away at us, but are weeds not also medicine? I make dandelion tea and I drink the root of you, sunshine and mud and sweat in a teacup" (2022, 162).
I come home to the kitchen table. The kitchen table where revolutions are born, the kitchen table where nourishment is collective, the kitchen table where my herbal medicines are made, the kitchen table where I lay out Dandelion and Yarrow and Burdock and Daisy to dry in the sun. I make Dandelion tea and let their anti-inflammatory, anti-carcinogenic, anti-rheumatic, and glycemic-regulatory medicine do its work (Hutchens 1992, 80-82; Lyle 2016, 11-13; Geniusz 2015, 198). I swallow an ancient medicine, a gift from my neighbors on this mountain as the nourishment they pulled up from their roots and condensed into their being dissolve into my gut. As a child, I didn’t know that the Dandelion puffballs I blew while making wishes into the wind were seeds that might one day grow into the nutrient-rich greens that now provide some of my necessary care in the form of a natural source of body-assimilable copper [10].
Figure 19. (left) A small Dandelion plant on one of the less frequently used driveways. The small plant, with no stems or flowers, is in the middle of the image. Two large brown Sycamore leaves are on either side of the plant, sitting in the top left and bottom right corners of the picture. The soil around is a deep brown, almost black, with some other small plants beginning to grow. Photo by author.
Figure 20. (right) A close up of a large and fully open Dandelion flower. The yellow flower head takes up the entire image, with each “petal” fully visible and in focus. They curl toward the center, and the stamens are also visible in a ring on the outside layers of the flower head. The composite flower head is made of up rings of countless yellow flowers that look like petals. Photo by author.
Figure 21. (left) A close up of a Dandelion flower head from the side, showing the individual flowers that appear to be petals. In this image, they are no longer curling toward the center, but fully wide open. The composite flower head can be seen to be a mix of “petals” and stamens, all yellow. The blurred background is textures of brown. Photo by author.
As I massage Dandelion salve into my aching leg muscles, tendons, ligaments, and joints, Cleo Wolfe Hazard continues to remind me: “It is important to counter these individualistic narratives with experiences of trans becoming through a sense of mutual recognition that one’s ‘self’ was never singular” (2022, 128). I joke that they/them are the most accurate pronouns and though said in jest, the statement holds many truths. The place this bodymind ends and the rest of the world begins is not a simple, visible biological line [11]. Pronouns in the English language mimic the settler colonial logics that assert false binaries—whether it be the distinction between human and nature, man and woman, body and mind, among many others. They/them leaves room for speculation, for ambiguity, for the multiplicity of being.
And the being of this bodymind is achieved through the walking of this mountain, through the lying on grass or moss or gravel, through the noticing of the Dandelions, through the making of medicine and the physical acts of tending to pain and fatigue. Jeanne Vaccaro writes,
"The handmade, transbiological encounter records the way that bodies accumulate, become in proximity, and build contact, independently of intervention defined as an intrusion, made by one for another, to foreground the relational capacity of bodies to evidence, measure, and reproduce identities difficult to quantify or control" (2015, 290).
The transgender of my bodymind does not live in my top surgery scar; it is woven into my connective tissue, a thread in the fabric of my being, collected in the connections and disconnections of this life. In the shifting and the chasm and the crumpling; every hello to this mountain or to the Dandelion outside my door is a becoming. It is through these transbiological accumulations that bodies, and their necessary networks of medicine and care, become ecological rather than individual concerns.
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, in expansive articulations of human care networks, offers: “The more systems are not a monoculture, the more sustainable they will be. The more there are a lot of different kinds of folks giving and receiving different kinds of care, the more there’s room for boundaries, ebbs and flows, people tapping out, and people moving up” (2021). The metaphor of monoculture versus a biodiverse ecosystem might, though, extend into the literal. Plants and fungi are the foundation of modern pharmaceutical medicines—losing species in a moment of mass extinction extends into the possible futures of medicine and care, for both their ecosystems and human bodies. A fluid reciprocity of care is not simply possible human-to-human; “Care doesn’t have to be one way. It can become an ongoing responsive ecosystem, where what is grown responds to need” (2021). Humans, as inextricable parts of our ecosystems, might offer non-extractive reciprocal care to our nonhuman neighbors. We might ask for it, too. And you might be surprised what is offered in return [12].
This life became more livable the moment I turned toward Dandelions not only as a research project, but also as neighbors and teachers and healers. Looking for Dandelions led to the recognition that they are necessary beings in my ecosystem of care; to the understanding that “care is a force distributed across a multiplicity of agencies and materials and supports our worlds as a thick mesh of relational obligation” (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017, 20). In the process, as I looked for Dandelions with every breath and every step, my ecosystem of care took new shape; “I walk, thinking not of concepts, but of beings” (Clare 2017, 186). No longer limited in scope to doctors and their tests and synthetic medicines and diagnoses, or to my human networks of care, or even to my service dog, care became the connective tissue that roots me in place [13]. Elijah Adiv Edelman reminds me, “radical care, or the care offered outside, beside, underneath, and perhaps even above normative outlets, is perhaps also the care that refuses a logic of cruel optimism” (2020, 82). The care of walking and breathing and being with this mountain and these Dandelions is not one that asks my bodymind to be able. They do not ask my connective tissues to be cured, nor do they ask for my pain to be eradicated. They do not ask for me to deny or overcome the fact that depression goes hand-in-hand with this pain. Refusing the ideology of cure, this ecosystem of care likewise refuses hierarchies of worth and animacy.
I follow this trans*ecology to Eva Hayward: “The body (trans or not) is not a clear, coherent and positive integrity. The important distinction is not the hierarchical, binary one between wrong body and right body, or between fragmentation and wholeness” (2016, 256). Which is perhaps to say that I am not positing a trans*ecology of care as a more whole understanding of care. Indeed, it is perhaps the fragmentation of transbiological accumulation in this ecosystem of care that demonstrates the ways in which the boundaries between fragmentation and wholeness limit the possibilities we imagine for bodies, for ecosystems, for care. And I think of the structure of Dandelions themselves: yellow flowers that stand out in lawns of green are actually heads with countless flowers—each “petal” is an individual flower, containing both the reproductive organs necessary to create the seed that eventually replaces the “petal” to form the puff ball, that eventually flies in the wind to land ready to grow into another plant.
I think of the ways Dandelions condense medicine into every part of themselves. Their drying flowers shrink and close on my kitchen table. Their greens grow small and crisp and a particular shade of dark gray green. The first frost has not yet arrived this year; they have not yet sent their nutrients back deep into their roots for winter so their roots do not yet lie on my kitchen table to dry in the sun too. Even with the assistance of Dandelions and allopathic medicine, I do not get the gift of a pain-free day in this life, my muscles and bones telling me not now or slow down or lie down NOW or simply rest are demands to listen to this bodymind, to this mountain, to these Dandelions. As I ask them, “how do I wilt this pain into nutrient?” I melt into the ease of existing with fragmentation, with precarity, in transition. There is a knowing that sits on the surface of my skin, when I listen for it I can sometimes make out its whispers into my laugh lines.
And Joshua Whitehead reminds me: “I am never alone in this momentous feasting. / The land is eating pain too” (2022, 205). The land is eating pain too. This forest, this mountain, is not just my home and my community and my teachers, but also an accomplice. An accomplice in the never ending task of fomenting the pain I hold into the creative expression of life. And Dandelions are an accomplice, too—in their unruly resistance to the settler colonial projects of lawns and construction sites and logging. They are an accomplice in this project of interdependence called life. An accomplice in the making of another world, of being always already in transition toward what could be. My dog nudges me yet again, and I ease myself down to the ground to let this mountain hold the weight of my bones and being for a while.
Notes
[1] I capitalize “Dandelion” (and other plant names) and refer to the plants with they/them pronouns throughout this paper in a conscious effort to shift my linguistic practices in ways that allow for more expansive expression of life, of animacy, perhaps even of personhood. This is also an effort to point to the hierarchies of animacy and value inherent in English classifications of “proper nouns” versus “improper nouns.” The grammars and logics of English, and any language, are arbitrary but significant—language matters inasmuch as language is matter. Robin Wall Kimmerer states succinctly: “English doesn’t give us many tools for incorporating respect for animacy. In English, you are either a human or a thing. Our grammar boxes us in by the choice of reducing a nonhuman being to an it, or it must be gendered, inappropriately, as a he or a she. Where are our words for the simple existence of another living being?” (2015, 57).I capitalize “Dandelion” (and other plant names) and refer to the plants with they/them pronouns throughout this paper in a conscious effort to shift my linguistic practices in ways that allow for more expansive expression of life, of animacy, perhaps even of personhood. This is also an effort to point to the hierarchies of animacy and value inherent in English classifications of “proper nouns” versus “improper nouns.” The grammars and logics of English, and any language, are arbitrary but significant—language matters inasmuch as language is matter. Robin Wall Kimmerer states succinctly: “English doesn’t give us many tools for incorporating respect for animacy. In English, you are either a human or a thing. Our grammar boxes us in by the choice of reducing a nonhuman being to an it, or it must be gendered, inappropriately, as a he or a she. Where are our words for the simple existence of another living being?” (2015, 57).
[2] How does one “possess” the soil?
[3] “It is believed that the [dandelion] may have arrived here with the Vikings in A.D. 100. It’s just as likely that they arrived with early settlers, hitchhikers in vegetable seed packets, in the nineteenth century. Passengers on the Mayflower, however, intentionally carried dandelions across the sea with them” (Mars 1999, 24).
[4] See Robbins, Lawn People: How Grass, Weeds, and Chemicals Make Us Who We Are (2007) and Jenkins, The Lawn: A History of an American Obsession (1994), for further in-depth examinations of the cultural and historical significance of the lawn in the United States.
[5] Cheryl Harris, in “Whiteness as Property,” states that “Possession—the act necessary to lay the basis for rights in property—was defined to include only the cultural practices of whites” (1993, 1721). This is clearly played out in the history of the lawn in the United States, and can be seen through its advertising as well as in the ways lawncare is policed and enforced.
[6] Much of my thinking about this particular history stems from being in conversation with and learning from Justin Robinson (@countrygentlemancooks), from his course “A History of the United States Through Plants,” July 4, 2022.
[7] When I talk about the logics of lawncare or the logics of colonialism, I am drawing deep influence from Spillers’ “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe” (1987), Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass (2015), and Sharpe’s In the Wake (2016). All three deftly articulate the ways that violent grammars and logics are at work through the English language and U.S. historical and contemporary cultural practices.
[8] I use “animate” here as a reference to Mel Chen’s expansive work in Animacies (2012) that is a potent analysis of animacy hierarchies and how they show up in our lives. Their work on the concept of animacy has been instrumental in my approach to studying Dandelions, one that has revealed the logics of colonialism while offering a powerful reorientation device as I ask how extending the field of discussion to Dandelions might change the scope of possibilities for them, for ourselves, and for other futures to emerge.
[9] Here I am using Sami Schalk’s language to refer to the ways in which the body/mind binary does not account for the ways that bodies and minds are not in fact separate entities (Schalk 2018). In this paper, I use bodies and bodyminds interchangeably, in an effort to expand the conceptual limits of the body(/bodymind).
[10] “Kee taught that the chief virtue that the dandelion has to share with Anishinaabeg is the fact that it is the only natural source of body-assimilable copper. The human body does not need very much copper. It is one of the trace elements that, although we do not need much, we cannot entirely do without, either. And dandelion has it for us. If a person just ate three of four helpings of dandelion greens or flowers in a whole year’s time, they would get enough of the mineral to keep them healthy” (Geniusz 2015, 195).
[11] “You carry around more microbes than your ‘own’ cells. There are more bacteria in your gut than stars in our galaxy” (Sheldrake 2020, 22). Western medicine and biology work to solidify their own narratives of which cells are deemed “human” and which “other”: “There are around a billion bacteria per square centimeter of skin” (Hamblin 2021, 344).
[12] A thread running underneath this entire essay is access and accessibility. I will not deny that having access to rural outdoors just outside my front door is an immense privilege that I do not take lightly, and it comes at the cost of distance from my other necessary medical care. Or that this kind of access is not drastically altered even if I can’t walk much on a given day. And, in the same breath, I want to offer that this engagement with ecology, with ecosystem, with nonhuman care, is possible in your front yard, on your city street, from your bed. As humans, we are not separate from the ecologies of which I write, and wherever we are—they are too. They will of course show up differently, and your interactions and awareness will be different from mine too, and if you look for care beyond human hands you might find it in unexpected places, from unexpected beings. I think of Mel Chen’s descriptions of their couch in Animacies (2012), and Petra Kuppers’ Starship Somatics, and Alison Kafer’s chapter “Bodily Natures” (2013), and the use of plant and flower essences, and many more.
[13] All of these scopes and scales of care are inherently intertwined; human life is so deeply entangled with nonhuman life, that my care, the care of my human community, and the care of our ecosystem are implicated in each other. Which is to say, caring for the microbial life of the Soil is also caring for my own human bodymind which is also caring for my fellow humans, though the threads between these scales of life might be indirect or unknown. This practice of reciprocal care is rooted in the specificities of place.
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About the Artist
Lydia Epp Schmidt is a Ph.D. Candidate in American Studies at the University of Kansas. Their master’s degree is in American Studies from the Universität Humboldt zu Berlin. They are currently the Assistant Editor of the interdisciplinary quarterly journal American Studies. Their dissertation takes dandelions and their human and more-than-human contexts as a case study to ask questions about bodies/bodily value, animacy, borders, the logics and grammars of nation, ecologies, dis/ability, weediness, and networks of care (among many more). Their work has been supported by The Huntington, KU’s Hall Center for the Humanities, Humanities Without Walls, and the National Humanities Center, among others.
Citation
Schmidt, Lydia E. 2024. “Looking for Dandelions: Finding Trans Ecologies of Care.” TSQ*Now, Transgender Studies Quarterly 11, no. 4. http://www.tsqnow.online/post/looking-for-dandelions
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