The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare
I see thee glittering from afar,
And then thou art a pretty star,
Not quite so fair as many are
In heaven above thee.
Yet like a star with glittering crest,
Self-poised in air thou seem'st to rest;
Let peace come never to his rest
Who shall reprove thee.
Sweet flower, for by that name at last,
When all my reveries are past,
I call thee, and to that cleave fast.
Sweet silent creature,
That breath'st with me in sun and air;
Do thou, as thou art wont, repair
My heart with gladness, and a share
Of thy meek nature."
With these beautiful lines I might well conclude my notices of the
poetical history of the Daisy, but, to bring it down more closely to our
own times, I will remind you of a poem by Tennyson, entitled "The
Daisy." It is a pleasant description of a southern tour brought to his
memory by finding a dried Daisy in a book. He says--
"We took our last adieu,
And up the snowy Splugen drew,
But ere we reached the highest summit,
I plucked a Daisy, I gave it you,
It told of England then to me,
And now it tells of Italy."
Thus I have picked several pretty flowers of poetry for you from the
time of Chaucer to our own. I could have made the posy fifty-fold
larger, but I could, probably, have found no flowers for the posy more
beautiful, or more curious, than these few.
I now come to the botany of the Daisy. The Daisy belongs to the immense
family of the Compositæ, a family which contains one-tenth of the
flowering plants of the world, and of which nearly 10,000 species are
recorded. In England the order is very familiar, as it contains three of
our commonest kinds, the Daisy, the Dandelion, and the Groundsel. It may
give some idea of the large range of the family when we find that there
are some 600 recorded species of the Groundsel alone, of which eleven
are in England. I shall not weary you with a strictly scientific
description of the Daisy, but I will give you instead Rousseau's
well-known description. It is fairly accurate, though not strictly
scientific: "Take," he says, "one of those little flowers, which cover
all the pastures, and which every one knows by the name of Daisy. Look
at it well, for I am sure you would never have guessed from its
appearance that this flower, which is so small and delicate, is really
composed of between two and three hundred other flowers, all of them
perfect, that is, each of them having its corolla, stamens, pistil, and
fruit; in a word, as perfect in its species as a flower of the Hyacinth
or Lily. Every one of these leaves, which are white above and red
underneath, and form a kind of crown round the flower, appearing to be
nothing more than little petals, are in reality so many true flowers;
and every one of those tiny yellow things also which you see in the
centre, and which at first you have perhaps taken for nothing but
stamens, are real flowers. . . . Pull out one of the white leaves of the
flower; you will think at first that it is flat from one end to the
other, but look carefully at the end by which it was fastened to the
flower, and you will see that this end is not flat, but round and hollow
in the form of a tube, and that a little thread ending in two horns
issues from the tube. This thread is the forked style of the flower,
which, as you now see, is flat only at top. Next look at the little
yellow things in the middle of the flower, and which, as I have told
you, are all so many flowers; if the flower is sufficiently advanced,
you will see some of them open in the middle and even cut into several
parts. These are the monopetalous corollas. . . . . This is enough to
show you by the eye the possibility that all these small affairs, both
white and yellow, may be so many distinct flowers, and this is a
constant fact" (Quoted in Lindley's "Ladies' Botany," vol. i.)[374:1]
But Rousseau does not mention one feature which I wish to describe to
you, as I know few points in botany more beautiful than the arrangement
by which the Daisy is fertilized. In the centre of each little flower is
the style surrounded closely by the anthers. The end of the style is
divided, but, as long as it remains below among the anthers, the two
lips are closed. The anthers are covered, more or less, with pollen; the
style has its outside surface bristling with stiff hairs. In this
condition it would be impossible for the pollen to reach the interior
(stigmatic) surfaces of the divided style, but the style rises, and as
it rises it brushes off the pollen from the anthers around it. Its lips
are closed till it has risen well above the whole flower, and left the
anthers below; then it opens, showing its broad stigmatic surface to
receive pollen from other flowers, and distribute the pollen it has
brushed off, not to itself (which it could not do), but to other flowers
around it. By this provision no flower fertilizes itself, and those of
you who are acquainted with Darwin's writings will know how necessary
this provision may be in perpetuating flowers. The Daisy not only
produces double flowers, but also the curious proliferous flower called
Hen and Chickens, or Childing Daisies, or Jackanapes on Horseback. These
are botanically very interesting flowers, and though I, on another
occasion, drew your attention to the peculiarity, I cannot pass it over
in a paper specially devoted to the Daisy. The botanical interest is
this: It is a well-known fact in botany, that all the parts of a
plant--root, stem, flowers and their parts, thorns, fruits, and even the
seeds, are only different forms of leaves, and are all interchangeable,
and the Hen and Chickens Daisy is a good proof of it. Underneath the
flowerhead of the Daisy is a green cushion, composed of bracts; in the
Hen and Chickens Daisy some of these bracts assume the form of flowers,
and are the chickens. If the plant is neglected, or does not like its
soil, the chickens again become bracts.
The only other point in the botany of the Daisy that occurs to me is its
geographical range. The old books are not far wrong when they say "it
groweth everywhere." It does not, however, grow in the Tropics. In
Europe it is everywhere, from Iceland to the extreme south, though not
abundant in the south-easterly parts. It is found in North America very
sparingly, and not at all in the United States. It is also by no means
fastidious in its choice of position--by the river-side or on the
mountain-top it seems equally at home, though it somewhat varies
according to its situation, but its most chosen habitat seems to be a
well-kept lawn. There it luxuriates, and defies the scythe and the
mowing machine. It has been asserted that it disappears when the ground
is fed by sheep, and again appears when the sheep are removed, but this
requires confirmation. Yet it does not lend itself readily to gardening
purposes. It is one of those--
"Flowers, worthy of Paradise, which not nice art
In beds and curious knots, but Nature's boon
Pour'd forth profuse on hill, and dale, and plain,
Both where the morning sun first warmly smote
The open field, and where the unpierc'd shade
Imbrown'd the noontide bowers."
_Paradise Lost_, iv, 240.
Under cultivation it becomes capricious; the sorts degenerate and
require much care to keep them true. As to its time of flowering it is
commonly considered a spring and summer flower; but I think one of its
chief charms is that there is scarcely a day in the whole year in which
you might not find a Daisy in flower.
I have now gone through something of the history, poetry, and botany of
the Daisy, but there are still some few points which I could not well
range under either of these three heads, yet which must not be passed
over. In painting, the Daisy was a favourite with the early Italian and
Flemish painters, its bright star coming in very effectively in their
foregrounds. Some of you will recollect that it is largely used in the
foreground of Van Eyck's grand picture of the "Adoration of the Lamb,"
now at St. Bavon's, in Ghent. In sculpture it was not so much used, its
small size making it unfit for that purpose. Yet you will sometimes see
it, both in the stone and wood carvings of our old churches. In heraldry
it is not unknown. When Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, was about to
marry Margaret of Flanders, he instituted an order of Daisies; and in
Chifflet's Lilium Francicum (1658) is a plate of his arms, France and
Flanders quarterly surrounded by a collar of Daisies. A family named
Daisy bear three Daisies on their coat of arms. In an old picture of
Chaucer, a Daisy takes the place in the corner usually allotted to the
coat of arms in mediæval paintings. It was assumed as an heraldic
cognizance by St. Louis of France in honour of his wife Margaret; by the
good Margaret of Valois, Queen of Navarre; by Margaret of Anjou, the
unfortunate wife of our Henry VI.; while our Margaret, Countess of
Richmond, mother of our Henry VII., and dear to Oxford and Cambridge as
the foundress of the Margaret Professorships, and of Christ College in
Cambridge, bore three Daisies on a green turf.
To entomologists the Daisy is interesting as an attractive flower to
insects; for "it is visited by nine hymenoptera, thirteen diptera, three
coleoptera, and two lepidoptera--namely, the least meadow-brown and the
common blue butterflies."[377:1]
In medicine, I am afraid, the Daisy has so lost its virtues that it has
no place in the modern pharmacopoeia: but in old days it was not so.
Coghan says "of Deysies, they are used to be given in potions in
fractures of the head and deep wounds of the breast. And this experience
I have of them, that the juyce of the leaves and rootes of Deysies being
put into the nosethrils purgeth the brain; they are good to be used in
pottage."[377:2] Gerard says, "the Daisies do mitigate all kinds of
paines, especially in the joints, and gout proceeding from a hot or dry
humoure, if they be stamped with new butter, unsalted, and applied upon
the pained place." Nor was this all. In those days, doctors prescribed
according to the so-called "doctrines of signatures," _i.e._, it was
supposed that Nature had shown, by special marks, for what special
disease each plant was useful; and so in the humble growth of the little
low-growing Daisy the doctors read its uses, and here they are. "It is
said that the roots thereof being boyled in milk, and given to little
puppies, will not suffer them to grow great."--COLE'S _Adam in Eden_.
One more virtue. Miss Pratt says that "an author, writing in 1696, tells
us that they who wish to have pleasant dreams of the loved and absent,
should put 'Dazy roots under their pillow.'"
On the English language, the Daisy has had little influence, though some
have derived "lackadaisy" and "lackadaisical" from the Daisy, but there
is, certainly, no connection between the words. Daisy, however, was
(and, perhaps, still is) a provincial adjective in the eastern counties.
A writer in "Notes and Queries" (2nd Series, ix. 261) says that Samuel
Parkis, in a letter to George Chalmers, dated February 16, 1799, notices
the following provincialisms: "Daisy: remarkable, extraordinary
excellent, as 'She's a Daisy lass to work,' _i.e._, 'She is a good
working girl.' 'I'm a Daisy body for pudding,' _i.e._, 'I eat a great
deal of pudding.'"
And I must not leave the Daisy without noticing one special charm, that
it is peculiarly the flower of childhood. The Daisy is one of the few
flowers of which the child may pick any quantity without fear of
scolding from the surliest gardener. It is to the child the herald of