I remember the 90’s, and running back and forth through the Zagreb Botanical Garden. Little me was fascinated by the greenery in the middle of the gray walls of the capital.
While I was standing on a meadow thinking what to explore next, my attention was drawn to hundreds and hundreds of dandelions. It was a beautiful sunny day, and wind gave all those tiny white parachutes the power to fly. They were passing by, crossing their paths and making that scene look like the first snowy day.
Dandelion’s flower head consists of numerous little yellow flowers collected together, which eventually turn into seeds with white “parachutes” – pappus. Those white hair-like filaments make it possible not only to keep the seed in the air, but even to ascend – they are formed in a way that lets the air flow up through them.
The air forms a unique type of vortex which makes an area of low pressure above the pappus, forcing it to go up. Length, number, position of those filaments, everything is made in perfect order, obeying the laws of physics.
One dandelion plant produces from 3000 to even 8000 seeds in a single season, and the seeds may keep the ability to germinate for up to 600 years. Just imagine – that is only one plant. There can be dozens, hundreds of dandelions on a field, each and every one of them striving to ensure the existence of the species in the next several hundred years.
Other species have also found various ways to do the same thing.
So, are we the only species that doesn’t think about the new generations? We aspire to be great, advanced, successful, technologically superior. But it seems to me that we have forgotten that any kind of development should be sustainable. That would be the real success.
Many of us think of personal growth and success as the ultimate life target. Somehow, in this race, in this frantic competition of life, we forgot to look at the bigger picture, forgot to think in advance, even to think of others – including our own children.
Many of us want to start a family, but we do so little to make our children’s future secure. We don’t know if our future generations will see all those natural beauties that we can see now. What we do know is that they won’t see many things that we enjoyed when we were little.
Many things have changed since my childhood. Many of them I long to see again, but I know that is impossible.
And dandelion? It tries to assure its existence in the next 600 years.
Here and in many other cases, we can find so many ideas, lessons, morals in nature around us. Even in places we would have never expected.
Literature
Cummins C., Seale M., Macente A. et al. (2018): A separated vortex ring underlies the flight of the dandelion. Nature 562, 414–418.