Flower Of The Week #1 - Dandelion

Being here in USA is a privilege to see all the beautiful flowers that are not available in my country, Philippines. I love flowers very much. My mother does, too. I want to make a photo collection of them starting this day. I will be posting the "Flower of the Week every Friday. These flowers will either be from our garden or from somewhere that I will have PERSONAL ENCOUNTER to... and definitely, they will be from my camera, too.

Although some people don't like these flowers because they consider these as nothing but weeds; for me, these are still flowers. Dandelion is the first flower that I saw sprung up around our lawn, and that made it gain the privilege to become the first flower that I will post here in this weekly meme.

.

From the generic name, Taraxacum, Dandelion is a large genus of flowering plants in the family Asteraceae. They are native to Europe, North America and Asia and two species, T. officinale and T. erythrospermum, are found as weeds worldwide. The common name Dandelion is given to members of the genus and like other members of the Asteraceae family, they have very small flowers collected together into a composite flower head. Each single flower in a head is called a floret. The leaves are 5–25 cm long or longer, simple and basal, entire or lobed, forming a rosette above the central taproot. The flower heads are yellow to orange colored, and are open in the daytime but closed at night. The heads are borne singly on a hollow stem (scape) which rises 4–75 cm above the leaves and exudes a milky sap (latex) when broken. A rosette may produce several flowering stems at a time. The flower heads are 2–5 cm in diameter and consists entirely of ray florets.