Taraxacum officinale and is derived from the word "opificina", later "officina", meaning a workshop or pharmacy. The flowers are used to make dandelion wine, the greens are used in salads, the roots have been used to make a coffee substitute (when baked and ground into powder) and the plant was used by Native Americans as a food and medicine. Dandelions are harvested from the wild or grown on a small scale as a leaf vegetable. The leaves (called dandelion greens) can be eaten cooked or raw in various forms, such as in soup or salad. They are probably closest in character to
Herbivore adaptations to plant defense net-like canal systems employed trenching to evade plant defenses. Plant chemical defenses can be used by herbivores, by storing eaten plant chemicals, and using them in defense against predators. To be effective defensive agents, the sequestered chemicals cannot be metabolized into inactive products. Using plant chemicals can be costly to herbivores because it often requires specialized handling, storage, and modification. This cost can be seen when plants that use chemical defenses are compared to those plants that do not, in situations when herbivores are excluded. Several species of insects sequester and deploy plant chemicals for their own defense. Caterpillar and