Many a plants enumerated in this short survey will justly be considered as weeds; for the most insignificant […] have the true weed’s proclivity for a dust heap as if it were the optimum of a plant’s desire. […]

The Dandelion, Taraxacum officinale, Weber, was until quite lately , included in the B.P. [British Pharmacopoeia] for use in atonic dyspepsia, the fresh root being used as a ‘bitter’. The smaller roots are employed to make dandelion coffee. Leaf as well as root contains the bitter substance taraxacin with insulin; the leaves are often palatable in salads and should not be bleached. The plant was cultivated in Germany before the war, and the imported root was often the size of a parsnip.

Edith Grey Wheelwright: The Physick Garden: Medicinal Plants and their History (1935)

Maria loved dandelions. Several years ago, her father was diagnosed with severe hepatitis and was told that he would most probably die of it. He decided to give up on life, on treatment, on everything. Not so his daughter. Maria looked up hepatitis and treatments everywhere she could think of, including a popular herbal book that recommends dandelions for liver disease. She got her father to eat dandelion leaves, stems, and flowers in salads and drink cups of dandelion tea every day, all day. Her father is still alive. She stopped weeding dandelions out of her garden altogether and now enjoys dandelion salads daily when they grow, with a dash of tomato sauce to cut through the bitterness.

A relational view of the world means seeing it through the relations among beings, things, and everything. It means paying attention to how everything relates and interacts with each other, shaping each other as they go. It means interconnections, entanglements, constructions, co-creations, enactments, processes of becoming, assemblages, networks, meshworks, and webs. Pick your vocabulary and your favourite thinker. Some can make it sound pretty convoluted, but it is quite simple: a garden and a human body are both co-created through dandelions and daughters… and an infinite number of other things and beings.

We and others take shape from these connections. And because everything keeps moving and doing, what exactly is taking shape is constantly changing. Everything is continuously made and remade through the movements and interactions of everything: plants, rocks, animals, microbes, petrol, silver, people, mountains, spirits, gods; you name it: those we know of, those we don’t, and everything in-between. It is a messy movement of connections that we are probably only partially aware of, yet we are still very much part of it.

When I think about it, well, it makes me dizzy.

It is a weird thing to talk about individuals as separate, distinct entities. Whilst we might like to call ourselves I, me, and myself – and obviously, there is a place and time for experiencing ourselves as individuals – there is not much within or around us that could exist without others. Each of us is a co-creation of many beings, and, in our turn, we are co-creators of many beings and worlds. Gardens are prime examples of such co-creations. Whether manicured lawns or spaces for dandelions, gardens themselves co-create worlds. They can feed birds, pollinating insects, and humans, maintain social status, keep us moving, and provide healing. Co-creation, however, is not omnipotence. It is a negotiation between dandelions kept out of vegetable beds and dandelions pushing through cracks in concrete pavements.

Want to geek out? Read up on Bruno Latour, Annemarie Mol, Tim Ingold, Lynn Margulis, Anna Tsing, Donna Haraway

The bark is harvested from young branches — Cortex Quercus. It has no smell, and its taste is astringent and slightly bitter. All species of the Quercus genus are medicinal.

Dr. Ing. Emil Păun: Sănătatea Carpaților (The Health of the Carpathians - 1995), p. 188 translated by me

We live in Transylvania, Romania. My two preschool daughters attend a forest kindergarten founded by three wonderful mothers. One of them diligently and lovingly cares for oak seedlings and bullies other parents into doing so. We then, at times, go out into fields chosen by biologists, children and all, to plant them into the protection of wild-grown bushes and human-made stakes.

Apparently, oaks are notoriously hard to regenerate and need a lot of human pampering (there is even a Wikipedia entry on oak regeneration failure). We could argue, however, that oak trees simply dislike a landscape that, over the past centuries, we imagined and shaped into clear-cut lines between closed forests and open habitats. Finding themselves classified as inhabitants of the former, their light-loving seedlings simply do not flourish. What they do seem to like is human disturbance. Give them uncultivated field margins and hedges, stone piles, ruins, railway- and roadsides or forests “managed” by cutting, coppicing, litter raking, burning, or pasturing, and you will have oaks growing.

To shift our very focused attention away from mysterious deep forests as the sole vestiges of Nature – although who doesn’t like mysterious deep forests – one of the perhaps least disappeared habitats loved by oaks are wood-pastures. Wood-pastures are places maintained through specific human management practices, including livestock grazing, forestry practices (such as logging, coppicing, or pollarding), shrub clearing, cutting tall vegetation, and controlled burning. They also hold exceptional ecological value, with rich biodiversity, often harbouring trees older than those in forests, distinctive bird, insect, and fungal communities, and genetic diversity.

My love of wood-pastures, apart of the obvious beauty, wonder, and awe their buzzing life instills, stems from the way, that contrary to the imagery of the pure wilderness of deep-dark forests, they so clearly show us how human choices and traditions have the possibility to create habitats of life. Walk a mile on overgrazed pastures, with no trees or shrubs, acres left open to the scorching heat of the summer sun, or have a picnic under a mighty oak tree on a wood-pasture, and you know what I mean by habitats of life. And yet, both are possibilities of human (co-)created worlds. Perhaps we should ask: what kinds of worlds do we co-create with oaks?