The eye of the day

My recollections of childhood always associate the familiar daisy with the dizzy days of high summer, sprawled on the lawn with a book or engaged in idle conversation with friends on the short turf of a school playing field. I think that it is because of the strength of this association within the brief but vivid memories of childhood, that I am always a little surprised to see daisies in flower now, at the transition from winter into spring. Yet the association of the daisy Bellis perennis with spring is one that is enshrined in folk tradition. An old country saying, of which there are several variants, has it that spring has not truly arrived until you can cover seven daisy flowers with your foot; in some parts of the country the figure is nine not seven, in others it is 12.

Writing in Flora Britannica, Richard Mabey reflects that there is scarcely a day during the year when there is not a daisy in flower somewhere within the country, something he further supports by drawing upon the journal of John Clare, the poet. Clare, writing in 1824, notes how he collected a handful of daisies in full bloom on Christmas Day.

The daisy is one of our most familiar flowers and is probably one that any child, no matter how removed from nature, would recognise and could quite possibly name. Yet it is an unassuming plant; the flowers, while botanically complex, appear structurally simple and it never attains a size that might intrude upon the gaze of the casual observer, glancing across the short green turf of a formal lawn. Each flower, with its bright yellow central disc around which are arranged the white petals, stands on a stalk just four inches or less in height, emerging from a rosette of flat and fuzzy leaves. Being small has its advantages but the plant is easily out competed by taller species and so does best where grazing or lack of nutrients favours a short sward.

It is thought that the name ‘daisy’ derives from the Anglo-Saxon ‘daeges-eage’ – the ‘eye of day’, a name suggestive of the opening of the flowers at dawn and their closure again at the end of the day. The petals that close about the golden orb at the day’s end feature in folklore, most commonly in a form of divination whereby a young girl wanting to know if her love is requited will pluck the petals one by one with the words ‘he loves me, he loves me not’. This too, holds childhood memories of a bashful youth and childhood games that broke down the barriers between the fair girls and us boys.