This carving in a French Limestone called Lepine by Maya Martin, was created as part of our exhibition ‘The Lost Words - Forget-me-not.’ For this exhibition artists have created a permanent record of the natural words removed from the Oxford Junior Dictionary. 30cm in diameter.

NOUN: DANDELION

A widely distributed weed of the daisy family, with a rosette of leaves and large bright yellow flowers followed by globular heads of seeds with downy tufts.

Genus Taraxacum, family Compositae: several species, in particular T. officinale, which has edible leaves

ORIGIN: Late Middle English: from French dent-de-lion, translation of Medieval Latin dens leonis ‘lion's tooth’ (because of the jagged shape of the leaves).

The DANDELION is a very delicate plant. Its seed heads come off with one breath and can float on the wind for miles. It is also a very strong plant that will come back persistently year after year whatever is done to it. It has beautiful, bright yellow flowers in the early summer. Unlike many flowering plants, once the petals have gone it remains distinctive thanks to its clock-like seed heads and its uniquely shaped leaves.

I have fond childhood memories, growing up in the Chilterns, walking through the countryside with my parents and playing out in the pastures and woodland with my friends. In early summer the green fields would be speckled with dandelion flowers and later on I remember blowing dandelion clocks into the air to tell the time on a warm summer’s day. We would watch seeds floating on the air and pretend it was snowing. I hope my children and generations to come will still walk into a field and say ‘Look at all the dandelions, mummy. Aren’t they pretty?’