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Let’s start with the greatest traveler among them, shall we?

In aisle E, row 34, sits the Taraxacum officinale . Otherwise known as the common dandelion. The dandelion is found all over the world in pretty much any habitat. It’s a survivor. It can grow in lawns or fields, in rocky hillsides or woodlands. It might be the first to sprout up in a new ecosystem, or the longest standing in an old one.

The story of this particular dandelion is a good one: you will want to pay attention.

It starts its life in an apple orchard in North America, let’s say Wisconsin. It nearly gets trodden on so many times, but luck is on its side. Because it bursts to life early in spring, much earlier than most flowers, it’s an important source of food to a whole bunch of insects and birds. Its pollen is rubbed onto the underside of a leaf-cutting bee, then carried to a female dandelion. The bee goes on to pollinate lots of other wild plants and flowers in his travels, but let’s stay with the dandelion for now. Its nectar is feasted on by the earliest butterflies and moths to emerge from their cocoons. Today this nectar also happens to feed a hummingbird and a woodpecker. As it ages, the dandelion’s head turns from its bright-yellow petals to become a seed head, or, as I like to call it, a blowball. The blowballs have a whole lot of single seeds with tiny hairs on top. These seeds fly in a way we humans had never seen before we saw the dandelion fly. On a balmy afternoon, the seeds of the blowball are lifted by a gust of wind. Some of them land not too far away and are gobbled up by sparrows and goldfinches. Some travel a different way to be eaten by a quail, a wild turkey, and a grouse. One is eaten by a field mouse, one by a chipmunk.

But there’s one seed that strikes out farther than the rest. It really flies. Across state lines into Minnesota. Floating and dancing. It travels a hundred kilometers. One hundred! That is a mind-boggling distance for a tiny seed, carried only by wind. Can you imagine? The farthest a seed has ever traveled by air.

But it’s not finished, what is left of this dandelion. It has more to do.

When it lands in Minnesota, it’s right in the path of a hungry white-tailed deer. The seed of the dandelion feeds the deer until it walks into the path of another creature. A gray wolf. She’s been looking for food for a long time. She devours the deer, taking enough meat to survive for weeks and sharing the rest of it with her mate and pups. It keeps her going a little longer in a difficult, hungry life. The wolves keep hunting together, keep the deer on the move, and allow the plants and trees of this land to grow. They keep rivers and soil healthy, they attract insects and mammals and birds to the ecosystem. They make it healthy enough for more dandelions to seed and sprout and start the whole cycle again.

But the dandelion—this single flower that has given nourishment to countless other living creatures—is considered a weed.