Except I thought I knew a dandelion until I started to learn about plants:) There are so many dandelion-like plants…or types of dandelion? but that’s what makes it interesting…
At knee-high I was following my mother around her work as a live-in school gardener … one of my favourite picture-books was a field guide to mushrooms…our holidays were camping and walking…so it came as a real shock to realise, quite recently, that the much-publicized funding and community initiatives currently addressing the need for environmental action treat plants as a background…eg trampling over them, even in some cases in sensitive forest, to plant trees to absorb carbon and feed the birds.
NB I love birds too. We don’t have any native mammals in New Zealand except two species of bat,(are they mammals?) neither seen by anyone I know. So wild animals here are mostly rats and Australian possums, both pests, unfortunately.