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
Dandelion Wine the story is Douglas Spaulding, a 12-year-old boy loosely patterned after Bradbury. Most of the book is focused upon the routines of small-town America, and the simple joys of yesterday. Bradbury noted in "Just This Side of Byzantium", a 1974 essay used as an introduction to the book, "Dandelion Wine" is a recreation of a boy's childhood, based upon an intertwining of Bradbury's own experiences and imagination. "Farewell Summer", the official sequel to "Dandelion Wine", was published in October 2006. While "Farewell Summer" is a direct continuation of the plot of "Dandelion Wine", "Something Wicked This Way Comes", a novel