They’re considered weeds because they were a poor person resource and not having them was a status symbol.
In Europe dating back to the 1500’s and even earlier, you could only have immaculate manicured lawns if you had just pots of money and were able to own land. So, rich nobility had swaths of land, and they demonstrated their wealth and power by hiring people to physically cut the grass and keep their gardens and dig weeds out of the turf by hand. It was a demonstration of money and power. It said “I can afford to have eight people employed full time just to dig things that aren’t grass out of my grass. I can afford to have all of this land doing nothing. It’s not producing food. People don’t farm it or live on it. I can afford to just grow grass, and have someone tend to that wholly useless crop.”
Fast forward a few hundred years. Europeans come to America. Many of them are from the poorer classes in Europe. Many have never owned land before, and now all of a sudden they can (because they stole it from the Native Americans but that’s a whole other rant.)
Now, at first you see little cottage gardens like the lower classes in Europe always had around their homes; places where they grew food and herbs and kept chickens or other livestock. Dandelions were welcome here; they were eaten and brewed into wine and used for medicine, just as they’d been for centuries.
But then people start making a little money, and we have the whole phenomenon of people who can demonstrate that they are Moving Up In The World by buying all of their food and medicine, just like the old landed gentry back in the Old Country. So they do. What goes in the place of those cottage gardens? Why, the same thing that went in the place of productive land back in the Earl of Chatsworth’s front lawn; a lawn.
So. Dandelions were a symbol. They were a throwback to the old days. They were a sign that you were somehow less prosperous than your neighbors, or lazier. (A Mortal Sin in America.) But, many Americans work, and can’t afford to hire a gardener just to grub dandelions out of the yard with a trowel all day.
Enter the lawn care industry, which began to market a dizzying array of poisons and fertilizers aimed at making your lawn a sterile moonscape where only grass grew with minimum effort from the homeowner. This continues to this day and is a multibillion dollar industry that has huge negative impacts on the environment and human health, but we can’t seem to shake that old ideal of a manicured lawn.
We pour water on deserts and poison on native wildflowers to attain it. We expose our children to poisons. We poison pollinators and pets. The days where we recognized a well kept lawn as a symbol of aristocratic leisure are gone, but we’ve been successfully fed a lie that some dandelions and chickweed are Bad by the lawn care industry in their ads for decades. They, obviously, want to keep it going because they’re making fat $$$$$$$ off of us.
THAT’S why dandelions are viewed as weeds.
Also yeah dandelions are really good for bees, and beloved by native bees and honeybees alike. So please, leave them blooming!! You can support bees and do your bit to smash capitalistic exploitation of the working class and the environment all in one go!
