“Turpentine and dandelion wine,

“I’ve turned the corner and I’m doing fine …”

— From a lyric by Randy Newman

At least once a week I mow my dandelions, and at least once a week I wonder why.

My yard is a checkerboard of various shades of green against a red-clay background, fringed around the edges by bright little yellow blossoms nodding in the breeze.

The blossoms never appear in my yard, because I mow down the stems before they have a chance to burst into color. But I admire those little dots of gold that form the border between my civilized yard and the tangled growth on the vacant lot that adjoins it. And I wonder who put out the word that the dandelion is a pest in need of extermination.

Randy Newman was on the right track with his lyric, based on “My Old Kentucky Home,” but he maybe carried it a little too far. As I recall Johnny Cash’s version, it tells of “fire in my belly and fire in my head, going higher and higher until I’m dead.”

I’ve tried dandelion wine, though I didn’t chase it with turpentine, which is probably where Randy and Johnny went wrong. As wines go, I prefer a decent Chianti or something crafted at home from blackberries or wild cherries, both of which also grow on the fringe of my yard.

The dandelion is something that should be enjoyed, not fought. The ones around here grow taller than those I remember from previous yards. I daily drive past fields ablaze with blooming dandelions, and I'm grateful that their owners leave it to the cows and horses to decide whether to nip the blossoms in the bud.

Miss Peggy, who takes the traditional view of dandelions, tried to shoo them out of our yard with a tank of weed killer. It worked on every dandelion she sprayed, but she missed more than she hit. Now, our yard is dotted with ugly black blotches where green dandelions used to be, and I wonder what good that poison stuff accomplished.

We live on a steep lot that looks across the road to Lake Hartwell, the reservoir formed by the damming of the Savannah River on the border between South Carolina and Georgia. In such a location, you don’t want a yard consisting of bare red clay unless you want your lot to wash into the lake and transform your home into a houseboat.

So I’ve tried to persuade grass to grow in my yard — any kind of grass, as long as it’s green and isn’t kudzu.

I gathered some sizeable rocks from the yard and piled them on a particularly vulnerable stretch of ground at the foot of my driveway. The rocks not only stopped the rushing rivulets of rainwater; they also encouraged all kinds of weeds to grow among them. I’ve found, at the expense of a broken lawn-mower blade, that you can’t mow rocks. I’ve also found that lawn trimmers and I don’t get along well. So I’m inclined to turn to weed killer on the rocks and hope it makes a deadly cocktail for the weeds.

I have been careful not to mow the area along the bank at the front of my yard. I leave it unmowed for two reasons: I don’t fancy tumbling down the bank aboard my riding mower, and I don’t want to cut the briars at the top of the bank.

Those briars are now loaded with green blackberries. Miss Peggy says the birds will eat them before I can harvest enough of them for a cobbler, but that’s OK. Maybe if I leave them there long enough, the vines will spread out and produce enough berries for both me and the birds.

The wild woods have also rewarded me with trees draped in honeysuckle and yellow jessamine. And there’s a wild cherry tree on the edge of the yard. I can’t find many people around here who eat wild cherries. When I was a kid, they were part of the cornucopia produced by the woodlands of my native state. Unfortunately, there are no muscadines or scuppernongs within sight of the place, and none of the wild plums that used to adorn the sides of dirt roads with spring blossoms and summer fruit. And I can’t find anybody who knows what a rabbit apple is, even if I call it a haw. They used to grow on the sandy hillsides of home and made good eating. Maybe if I mix the cherries, blackberries and dandelions I’ll come up with enough pulp to make a glass or two of wine.

As I rumble around the yard on my riding mower, I let my thoughts drift into those woods for a brief taste of childhood when anything that blossomed was considered pretty and anything edible was yours for the picking.

I think it would take dynamite to rid the yard of dandelions, and that would probably get rid of the yard as well.

My friend Earl (yes, I have a friend named Earl) suggested that I plant dandelions all over the yard.

“Nothing you plant will come up,” he said. “So why not plant dandelions? They won’t come up either, so you’ll be rid of them.”

I’ll think about that later, over my glass of blended dandelion, blackberry and wild cherry wine.

Readers may write Gene Owens at 315 Lakeforest Circle, Anderson SC 29625, or e-mail him at WadesDixieco@AOL.com.