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Looking With The Eyes of a Child
Dandelions
When we are out walking, my four-year-old daughter loves to stop and look at flowers, insects, or anything else that catches her eye. It means that we do not get anywhere in a hurry, but I usually stop alongside her. She has not grown out of looking at the world with a child’s eyes, and this is something that adults need to remind themselves how to do.
As she picks a dandelion flower and enthuses over the bright yellow petals, I smile to myself. She knows nothing of weeds. What is a weed? A plant that is not meant to be growing in that particular location. Who decided that? Not the plant but the human who wants to impose artificial order on the world around them. The weed status of the dandelion is meaningless to her; she appreciates it for its brightly coloured flower, a tiny beacon against the green lawn. Yellow is the colour of joy, and young children know how to find joy in everyday life.
The concept of the natural world versus the humanmade world is a tricky one for her. She equates green and plants with nature. Is the nature strip alongside the footpath natural? It is planted with grass and so it is green, but it was human endeavour that laid the road and the footpath, then planted the lawn. Yet dandelions can be found anywhere, despite the human interventions of weeding, spraying, mulching.
