With 17 Vineland farmers growing dandelions on a total of about 25 hectares,
the crop is now worth around $400 000 a year. Though the roots are sometimes
dried, ground and roasted to make a caffeine-free substitute for coffee,
it is the jagged-edge leaves that fill the pickers’ baskets.

Most of the leaves end up in restaurants and markets in Philadelphia,
Baltimore and New York. Here gourmets and ethnic groups from Greeks and
Lebanese to Armenians and even the Amish snap them up to make salads, soups
and omelettes, or more adventurous recipes such as dandelion beef roulette
and dandelion sweet cup.

The Vinelanders have taken a leaf, so to speak, from the French. In
France, dandelions are still sold in many a market. Plein Coeur and Tres
Hatif are just two of several cultivated dandelion varieties grown under
cover in France for picking in winter and spring. Salade de Pissenlits –
a name derived from the plant’s well-known diuretic properties – is often
served with a rich meat dish. Simple but delicious, it’s made by frying
a few small cubes of streaky bacon until the fat runs, adding a couple of
tablespoons of wine vinegar, letting the liquid bubble before pouring the
lot over the chopped, young dandelion leaves.

Little troubled by pests or disease, and all too easy to grow anywhere,
dandelions do best on a rich soil with manure dug well in. This versatile
plant has acquired a plethora of names in its history, from culinary-based
wild endive through descriptive lion’s teeth and golden suns, to herbalist
heart fever grass and piss-a-bed and the downright unpleasant stink Davie
or even shit-a-bed. As any gardener can tell you a dandelion has long roots.
So, too, does its cultivation.

First mentioned by the Arabian physician and herbalist Avicenna, in
the 10th century, it has long been used as a food plant. In Minorca, the
islanders are supposed once to have subsisted on it when a swarm of locusts
devoured all other vegetation. The 17th-century diarist John Evelyn wrote,
‘With this homely salley, Hecate entertained Theseus’. And in the English
Midlands, dandelion stout once quenched many a thirst worked up in the heavy
industrial towns.

But the British have never really taken to the culinary delights of
dandelions, despite the efforts of Charles Hill, the Radio Doctor who regaled
wartime citizens with the food value of dandelion leaves. Mrs Beeton includes
just one recipe: for stewed dandelion leaves. The 30 minutes of boiling
she recommends, however, will produce what may politely be described as
a steaming, slimy, green splodge.

Of the large seeds merchants in Britain, only Suttons Seeds now sells
dandelion seeds – ‘a continental salad variety’ – for cultivation. Thomson
and Morgan gave up a couple of years ago.

To gather dandelions at their best, pick young leaves before the flower
stems appear as they are then less acid. Even better, force the young plants
in spring under a flowerpot or bucket, leave them for a week or two, then
pick the blanched leaves. Blanching can even happen naturally if a mole
is helpful enough to throw up a mound of soil around a dandelion plant.
Such ‘mole lettuce’ is a vegetable delicacy in Holland.

The plant’s nutritional credentials run like this. Gram for gram, dandelion
leaves have 50 per cent more vitamin C than tomatoes, twice as much protein
as aubergine, double the fibre content of asparagus and as much iron as
spinach. Vineland’s dandelion farmers plant them in rows 15 centimetres
apart and protect them over winter with plastic sheeting.

In Vineland, the man who more than any other has promoted the town’s
claim to produce more dandelions than anywhere else in the world, former
mayor Patrick Fiorilli, has been picking them in the wild to eat since he
was a child. His annual dandelion dinners in Vineland frequently run to
seven courses, each of which is based on you know what.

Dandelion recipes abound in the food-for-free type of cookbook. Roger
Phillips’s Wild Food has eight, from dandelion flower wine to dandelion
nitsuke. And if you’re not tempted by the leaves, try picking the very young
flower buds to preserve in vinegar. They can be used like capers.

Dr Malcolm Smith is a biologist and writer based in North Wales.

In Britain, domestic or captive animals are provided, in theory at least,
with legislation to protect them against cruelty. Protection is provided
by a whole series of acts of Parliament dating from 1911 to 1964. But while
you and I may have a clear (or at least translucent) idea of what a domestic
animal is, understanding what is, or isn’t, in legal terms a captive animal
is a little more tricky.

Did you know, for example, that, if you were so cruelly inclined, you
could throw knives into a whale stranded on a beach and not be committing
an offence under any of the acts? The legal precedent is Steele v Rogers,
in 1912. The same thinking – that a captive animal is one that must be more
than temporarily prevented from escaping – applies to a wild deer restrained
before it is killed. As far as the law is concerned, no cruelty takes place.
But a pet lizard, or a goldfish in little Jimmy’s glass bowl, has the full
might of the Protection of Animals Act behind it – at least theoretically.

There are double standards, too, as a result of the Protection of Animals
(Anaesthetics) Acts, 1954 and 1964. They make provision for operations on
animals where the lack of an anaesthetic would cause pain. And while it
is the exceptions to the provisions of these acts which cover experiments
on animals for scientific purposes that have attracted virtually all the
attention, there are other exceptions that have rarely attracted much –
if any – comment.

Take docking dogs’ tails for instance. To comply with the pathetic fashions
that dog breeders insist we should adhere to, many breeds of dogs born,
perfectly naturally, with long tails have them cut short when they are very
young puppies. So long as it’s done when the poor animals still haven’t
opened their eyes (a couple of weeks after birth for most breeds) all you
need is a strong pair of scissors – and a strong stomach.

Some years ago I did it to poodle puppies, the breeding of which was
then a family hobby. Don’t tell me that the gut-wrenching squeals, the spurts
of blood, and the frantic scratching and yelping of the mother – kept well
away for her own, and our, safety – indicated that the procedure was anything
other than incredibly cruel. A barbaric act for the sake of fashion and
nothing else. I’d never do it again, legal or not.

For some inexplicable reason the Protection of Animals (Anaesthetics)
Acts don’t apply to ‘a fowl or other bird, fish or reptile’. So an operation
on any of these animals is not automatically deemed to have been carried
out without ‘due care and humanity’, even if no anaesthetic is used.

Even the more recent legislation contains paradoxes. Section 8 of the
Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, for example, which deals with captive
birds, requires that a cage in which a bird is kept must be big enough for
it to stretch its wings freely. So if you put a starling you have saved
from the cat into a cage which is too small for it to flap its wings, you
could, according to the law, be liable to prosecution. I use the case of
a starling (the bird) advisedly. The case of Starling (a human one) v Brooks
in 1956 held that a bird’s confinement is a question of fact; a valid motive
for keeping it in too small a cage, or the absence of suffering, are both
untenable as a defence against prosecution. The double standard arises because
Section 8 doesn’t apply to poultry, nor to a bird being shown in a public
exhibition or competition for up to 72 hours on end.

Contrast these exceptions with the freedom of action given to a farmer
under the Dogs (Protection of Livestock) Act, 1953. A dog ‘worrying’ (curious
term this) livestock is effectively liable to summary execution by a farmer.
‘Worrying’ includes anything from attacking, chasing in a way likely to
cause ‘diminution of their produce’ (presumably meaning the chased sheep
or cow will lose a bit of weight) to simply being in the same field with
the livestock and not held on a leash or under close control.

Malcolm Smith is a biologist and writer.

But what’s that crunching noise underfoot? Are there more twigs on the
woodland floor than usual, or have snails launched some invasion? No, of
course not, it’s just the usual crunch of brittle pink plastic that litters
the wood. It’s high time I got used to these normal woodland sounds – greater
spotted woodpeckers drumming on the trees, wood warblers singing their cadenzas,
blackbirds turning over dead leaves in search of food, and the crunch, crunch
of polypropylene underfoot.

Perhaps I should explain myself. These thoughts on a wood in spring
are prompted by the apparent obsession that anyone now planting a broadleaved
tree seems to have with tree shelters. The results should be apparent in
a few years’ time.

You must have seen the tree shelters. They are the translucent pinkish
plastic tubes that are staked to the ground around a newly planted tree.
In section they can be square, round, triangular, or possibly other shapes
too. Invented by the Forestry Commission about seven years ago, they are
supposed to give a young tree a head start on its silvicultural life by
subjecting it to a mini-greenhouse effect. The tube keeps the wind at bay
while the warmth inside encourages the sapling to shoot up. They also offer
some protection from browsing animals.

Tree shelters have become big business. A myriad small companies now
compete to sell their plastic products, at a price of about Pounds sterling
500 to Pounds sterling 600 for a thousand, proportionately more for smaller
orders. And the stakes are extra.

Almost all of the shelters are made out of polypropylene, which the
companies insist will auto-degrade – given time. One obvious question is:
how much time? Two companies, Somerford (based in Chippenham, Wiltshire)
and Corruplast (based in Gloucester) reckon that their shelters will degrade
to little pieces in three to five years. For complete degradation, another
company, Tubex (based in Woking) estimates that its shelters will be gone
in perhaps eight years. Incidentally, Tubex also sell stakes made out of
polypropylene (most people use wood), a great chunk of plastic that is going
to take many years, if not forever, to degrade completely.

But the truth is that no one knows precisely how long they will last.
True, a combination of ultraviolet light (from sunlight), weathering, oxygen
and moisture will slowly degrade the long chains of polypropylene the shelters
are made of, reducing their plasticity and making them increasingly brittle.
What this means is that wind, a bump from an animal, or shot from a shotgun
– tree shelters make spectacular target practice when they’re good and brittle
– will cause them to break up. As the tree grows up and out of them, the
shelter is supposed to break up into pieces, which then get blown around
the wood.

But further degradation of the small fragments of polypropylene is fraught
with difficulties and unknown timetables. Down on the damp woodland floor
among the flowers, mosses and grasses, ultraviolet light hardly gets a look
in. So breakdown will have to depend on other weathering factors. Polymer
experts I have consulted agree that any further degradation is likely to
be very slow and that nobody can be sure how long it will take for the pieces
to degrade to a polypropylene powder which will then become a component
of the woodland soil.

You have only to take a walk along a stretch of seashore to understand
how well plastics stand up to a barrage of light, salt water, wind and general
weathering under conditions far more extreme than the sheltered haven of
a broadleaved wood. Before very long a biologist will be able to tell whether
what he is looking at is largely natural, or has been planted up by foresters,
not by identifying the species of trees but from a simple analysis of the
soil for polypropylene.

There is at least one hopeful sign before all our woods resound to the
crunch of plastic. Some foresters are themselves questioning the profligate
use of shelters, arguing that they need to be used only under particular
circumstances and that in many locations they can even be a disadvantage.
S. H. Murray Wells, of Westonbirt Woodland Services, writing recently in
the Quarterly Journal of Forestry, argues that shelters of the normal height
(1.2 metres) should be used to protect only a few tree species, particularly
oak in sheltered forest situations. ‘Elsewhere,’ says Wells, ‘they are expensive,
labour-intensive and unattractive. Their use in exposed areas and for amenity
planting is inefficient.’

Richard Webster, forestry officer with the Snowdonia National Park,
writing in the same journal, goes further. ‘It seems,’ he says, ‘that there
has been an element of clutching at tree shelters like straws as a panacea
for all the difficulties associated with growing broadleaves, which . .
. they are not.’ Webster quotes examples of planting schemes in Snowdonia
– an area with far more testing conditions than the lowland areas in which
shelters were originally developed and tested – in which oaks have often
fared better without, rather than with, the shelters. ‘The sight of bracken
fronds or blades of grass waving in the breeze (out of the tops of the shelters),
instead of the tree they had expected, is one which I suspect will be familiar
to many,’ he says wryly.

But many foresters still claim that a well staked tree shelter will
stand up to farm livestock and eliminate the need to keep animals out of
the planting area. They probably haven’t seen a Welsh Black, or a Suffolk
ram come to that, when it gets an itch on its back and a tree shelter is
conveniently close by! There is, too, a not unreasonable expectation, in
my view, that broadleaved woods should look as natural as possible, even
if they’re actively managed to grow timber. The mentality of serried ranks
of Sitka spruce planted in straight rows on many a bare hillside (and much
criticised as a result) is rapidly catching on in our broadleaved woods
too. Neat rows of pink plastic tree shelters, all evenly spaced, give an
effect more reminiscent of a graveyard than a woodland. And since woodland
owners and managers will in most cases be getting sizeable grants for planting
from the taxpayer (mainly via the Forestry Commission or Countryside Commission)
a bit more thought to how the job looks would not go amiss.

To me it seems ironic that at a time when dumping plastics at sea has,
for the first time, been banned internationally under the Marpol Convention,
we’re dumping the stuff in our woods instead.

Malcolm Smith is a biologist and freelance writer.