To the editor:

Given the prompt by Pat Kehde in her recent letter “Stop the Mowing” and the research by Jeanne Klein in her History of the Douglas County Horticultural Society, I offer the following.

Forest Savage, a member of the Second Emigrant Aid Party of 1854 remembered this story at an early meeting of the society:

My father and mother visited their old home in Vermont, in 1862, and when they came back they brought some dandelion seed back with them … and in the summer of 1863 it came in bloom … People who came along the street would stop to look at them and were reminded of the old friend they had left behind … When the seed ripened they would ask for some to sow in the gardens of their new homes. Thus they were scattered around. — Minutes of the Douglas County Historical Society, The Daily Gazette, July 24, 1907.

Maybe another reason to mow less this spring?

Shelley Hickman Clark,

Lawrence