Today we’re going to talk about two plants that most people will refer to as a weed, but what is a weed other than a plant that exists somewhere we don’t want it to exist. There are fancier definitions, but they all say basically the same thing. Since these two are either about to pop up or about to pop up let’s talk about henbit and dandelion.

Henbit is technically called Lamium amplexicaule...kind of a fancy name for something most people just call that purple flowered weed. Henbit is actually in the mint family (Lamiaceae) and is related to other Lamiums. In some countries, the leaves of henbit are eaten raw of cooked, but here it’s mostly annoying to those people trying to keep their turf lawns weed free.

Henbit is considered a winter annual, meaning that it germinates in the fall and winter and then actively grows in the spring. If you were wanting to keep your lawn winter annual weed free, you would need to have applied pre-emergent last fall. If you now have henbit popping up in your lawn, apparently that didn’t happen.

While some people don’t like henbit in their yards, I would encourage you to try to change your attitude about henbit. First of all, it produces beautiful purple flowers, flowers that are some of the first, if not the first to emerge in the year. Driving around town now you can run across fields or entire yards that are covered with purple flowering henbit. I think it’s very pretty. Plus, as one of the first flowers to bloom, it becomes a first foods for our pollinating insects which could use our help.

It seems like every article I read about butterflies indicates the butterfly populations in the U.S. Are in decline. So, a pretty simple way you could help with that is to leave your henbit alone and just mow it when you do your first lawn mowing since it will be dying out in late spring anyway. This leaves you plenty of time to get that turf grass back where you want it.

Here’s another “weed” to consider leaving alone - dandelion. Kids of course love them because it’s great fun to pick up one of those stems with seeds and blow on them, letting them drift down to the ground. I would suggest we reach back to the little kid in us and let the dandelions do their thing. And again, in some parts of the world, dandelions are actually cultivated and used for both food and herbal remedies.

If you leave your dandelions, you’ll not only get those pretty yellow flowers, but once again you’ll be helping the pollinators since it’s another one of those early bloomers. And again, it has a fairly short lifecycle which means it will bloom, do its thing, and then be gone till next year.

Yes, if you leave the henbit and dandelions, your neighbors might be more annoyed than usual, but be that other kind of neighbor…the one that cares more about supporting our environment than maintaining the “perfect lawn,” unless of course we want to change the definition of a perfect lawn to one that includes henbit and dandelions. See you in the garden!

You can get answers to all your gardening questions by calling the Tulsa Master Gardeners Help Line at 918-746-3701, dropping by our Diagnostic Center at 4116 E. 15th Street, or by emailing us at mg@tulsamastergardeners.org. Photo: Chris Evans, University of Illinois, Bugwood.org