333 Dandelions

An Earth Prayer

Jul 06, 2026

It began with a simple question. How many were there?

I have known dandelion as medicine.I have known dandelion as food.

I have known dandelion as flower essence and pigment. I have known dandelion through tinctures, decoctions, festivals + feasts, through years of teaching herbalism.

But on this spring morning, I wasn’t seeing dandelion the medicine. Or dandelion the rebel.Or even dandelion the art collaborator. I was seeing abundance. For the first time, I was seeing abundance before I was seeing dandelions.

It was such an ordinary question that I almost dismissed it. I have a habit of counting things. It’s what my mind does when I slow down, when I’m resting, when I’m paying attention. But the more I looked, the more impossible it became to ignore the great abundance scattered across the grass. Hundreds of bright suns. Each one feeding pollinators before the fruit trees bloomed. Each one arriving without invitation.

The question carried me back to my years of herbal practice and to Dr. Peter Gail, the ethnobotanist affectionately known as the “King of Dandelions.” His life’s work challenged the stories we tell about this common plant, inviting us to see food where we had been taught to see weeds, medicine where we had been taught to see nuisance.

For many years at Blazing Star Herbal School we celebrated a Dandelion Festival every May. Apprentices gathered blossoms, made honey, wine, fritters, flower essences, honey, muffins,medicines, and laughter. Somewhere along the way the festival quietly disappeared. Perhaps this project calls its return.

Photo of tables with dishes made of dandelions — Dandelion Feasts and Festivals

As I began to count another question emerged. What if every dandelion became a prayer? Not a metaphor. An actual prayer.

I gathered 333 blossoms and carried them one by one to a red maple tree. Each flower was placed deliberately around the roots. Each blossom becaming an offering.

Each placement became a gesture of reciprocity. By the end, the tree stood within a circle of yellow suns, the roots extending outward through lines of dandelions like a living mandala.

The work lasted only a few hours before I recollected the blossoms and embossed 111 of them into an artist book, an eco-printed scroll. Its impermanence was part of the prayer.

One of the prayers that emerged from the work now accompanies every bottle of dandelion flower essence I make:

“I soften the tension carried in bodies and spirits.”

What began as a land artwork became something much larger in relationship because I listened to the whispering of the dandelion telling me that this project isn’t simply one about dandelion but a relationship between dandelion red maple and human. At this point the project continued to unfold in directions I could never have anticipated. Moving images. A growing collection of participatory scores. Imagined plant prophecies. An illuminated shrine built into the body of a maple tree.

Along the way I found myself thinking more about shrines. How shrines transform. And shrine asks us to enter into relationship; shrine thinking. For me, shrine thinking is not about religion. It is a way of arranging attention. It is the slow accumulation of gestures that say:

This matters.

This is worthy of care.

This overlooked thing deserves reverence.

and in this way once again the dandelion and the maple became my teachers.

Robin Wall Kimmerer often writes of maple as a teacher of reciprocity and generosity. Standing beneath this particular maple over many months, I began to wonder what conversation might exist between these two beings.

Fragments of an imagined interspecies dialogue:

Maple:
I have spent decades learning how to stand still.

Dandelion:
I have spent centuries learning how to move.

Maple:
Humans come to me for sweetness.

Dandelion:
Humans poison me for thriving too freely.

Maple:
My gifts require patience.

Dandelion:
Mine arrive immediately.

Maple:
I teach reciprocity through seasons.

Dandelion:
I teach resilience through disturbance.

Maple:
They admire me.

Dandelion:
They attempt to erase me.

Both:
Yet we both continue feeding the world.

Together they offer different strategies for living ethically within a damaged world.

The maple teaches rootedness.

The dandelion teaches dispersal.

The maple offers shelter.

The dandelion offers abundance.

The maple grows through centuries.

The dandelion through persistence.

One of the surprises of this project has been discovering how deeply the work of Yoko Ono has quietly shaped my thinking. Not just aesthetically but also methodologically. Like Ono’s instruction pieces, 333 Dandelions extends beyond objects into actions. The artwork is not simply the installation.

In honor of Yoko Ono, I made a little zine of scores. If you’d like me to mail you a copy, simply leave your snail mail address in the comments (or send it to me privately), and I’ll happily send one your way.

Like dandelion seeds, I hope these scores continue to disperse. Because the artwork doesn’t end with the installation.

It is also an invitation. And a ritual. The moment someone pauses beneath a tree A flower essence carried home. A prayer tucked into a pocket. A new way of seeing the common. The work continues through participation.

Thank you, Yoko.