Ox-eye Daisy

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that daisies are my favorite flower, but you might not know exactly why. Here’s the answer:

Daisies are a composite flower, which means that they have many individual flowers inserted on a flattened, broad receptacle so that they appear to be one large flower. When you look at a daisy, you’re actually looking at hundreds of tiny flowers combined!

So it is with human beings. Often we give a glance or half an ear and think we know everything we need to know. Upon closer examination, we discover the composite of individual gifts and attributes that God combined to form that person.

The White Daisy

“Every child loves this flower, and yet it is not well understood; it is always at hand for study from June until the frost have laid waste to the fields. However much enjoyment we get from the study of this beautiful flower-head, we should study the plant as a weed also, for it is indeed a pest to those farmers who do not practice a rotation of crops. Its root is long and tenacious of the soil, and it ripens many seats which mingle with the grass seed and thus the farmer sows it to his own undoing. The bracts of the involucre, or the shingles of the daisy-house, are rather long, and have parchment like margins. The overlap in two or three rows. In the daisy flower-had, the banner-flowers are white; there may be 20 or 30 of these, making a beautiful frame for the golden-yellow disk-flowers. The banner is rather broad, is veined, and toothed at the tip. The banner-flower has a pistil which shows its two-parted stigma at the base of the banner, and it matures a seed. The disc-flowers are brilliant yellow, tubular, rather short, with the five points of the corolla curling back. The anther-tubes and the pollen are yellow, so are the stigmas. The arrangement of the buds at the center is exceedingly pretty. The flowers develop no pappus, and therefore the seeds have no balloons. They depend upon the ignorance and helplessness of man to scatter their seeds far and wide with the grass and clover seed, which he sows for his own crops. It was thus that it came to America, and in this manner still continues to flaunt its barriers in our meadows and pastures. The white daisy is not a daisy, but a chrysanthemum. It has never been called by this name popularly, but has at least 20 other common names, among them the ox-eye daisy, moon-penny, and herb-Margaret.”

~Handbook of Nature Study, by Anna Botsford Comstock, copyright 1911.

Over the shoulders and slopes of the dune I saw the white daisies go down to the sea, A host in the sunshine, an army in June, The people God sends us to set our heart free.

~ William Bliss Carmen