Pu Gong Ying

Taraxacum mongolicum, the Mongolian dandelion or Pu Gong Ying, is a perennial herbaceous plant in the Asteraceae, native to northern and central China, Korea, Japan, Mongolia and adjacent parts of Russia, where it grows in meadows, roadside grasslands, field margins and waste ground. The plant has a thick, fleshy, often branched taproot 5 to 15 cm long that exudes white latex on cutting. The leaves form a basal rosette flat on the ground, are oblanceolate in outline, 4 to 20 cm long, and are deeply pinnatifid into backward-pointing triangular lobes with a large terminal segment; the surfaces vary from glabrous to sparsely cobwebby-hairy. Each scape is hollow, leafless and 10 to 25 cm tall, bearing a single solitary capitulum. The flowerhead is 2.5 to 4 cm across with bright yellow ligulate florets only and an involucre of two to three rows of green, often dark-tipped bracts, the outer ones recurved at maturity. The fruit is a pale-brown achene topped by a long white pappus, forming the familiar globular seed head.