Daisy

Daisy (or else "the eye of the daie," as Chaucer calls it, the "bairnwort" of Yorkshire) is the favourite flower of children and of the poets of nature, from Chaucer to Burns. It is the "marguerite," or pearl, of the French. Bellis perennis, the common daisy, is the only British representative of its genus, one of the Compositae. It is a perennial, growing throughout most of Europe as a weed in grass, with a short stem, a rosette of numerous, slightly hairy, spathulate leaves and scapes an inch or two high with yellow disk florets and white ray ones, pink at their tips and on their under-surfaces. Garden varieties are often "double," or have all the florets crimson. That known as the "hen-and-chicken "daisy is interesting morphologically, as the ten or twelve bracts of the involucre have each an axillary branch bearing a small inflorescence. The daisy blossoms almost all the year round. The ox-eye, or moon, daisy is the common larger-flowered meadow weed, Chrysanthemum leucanthemum, and the name Michaelmas Daisy is given to autumn-flowering species of Aster (q.v.).