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LOVEMENOT
(Chrysanthemum Leucanthemum) Thistle family
Flower-heads - Disk florets yellow, tubular, 4 or 5 toothed,
containing stamens and pistil; surrounded by white ray florets,
which are pistillate, fertile. Stem: Smooth, rarely branched, to
3 ft. high. Leaves: Mostly oblong in outline, coarsely toothed
and divided.
Preferred Habitat - Meadows, pastures, roadsides, wasteland.
Flowering Season - May-November.
Distribution - Throughout the United States and Canada; not so
common in the South and West.
Myriads and myriads of daisies, whitening our fields as if a
belated blizzard had covered them with a snowy mantle in June,
fill the farmer with dismay, the flower-lover with rapture. When
vacation days have come; when chains and white-capped old women
are to be made of daisies by happy children turned out of
schoolrooms into meadows; when pretty maids, like Goethe's
Marguerite, tell their fortunes by the daisy "petals;" when music
bubbles up in a cascade of ecstasy from the throats of bobolinks
nesting among the daisies, timothy, and clover; when the blue sky
arches over the fairest scenes the year can show, and all the
world is full of sunshine and happy promises of fruition, must we
Americans always go to English literature for a song to fit our
joyous mood?
"When daisies pied, and violets blue,
And lady-smocks all silver white,
And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue,
Do paint the meadows with delight-"
sang Shakespeare. His lovely suggestion of an English spring
recalls no familiar picture to American minds. No more does
Burns's
"Wee, modest crimson-tippit flower."
Shakespeare, Burns, Chaucer, Wordsworth, and all the British
poets who have written familiar lines about the daisy, extolled a
quite different flower from ours - Bellis perennis, the little
pink and white blossom that hugs English turf as if it loved it -
the true day's-eye, for it closes at nightfall and opens with the
dawn.
Now, what is the secret of the large, white daisy's triumphal
conquest of our territory? A naturalized immigrant from Europe
and Asia, how could it so quickly take possession? In the
over-cultivated Old World no weed can have half the chance for
unrestricted colonizing that it has in our vast unoccupied area.
Most of our weeds are naturalized foreigners, not natives. Once
released from the harder conditions of struggle at home (the
seeds being safely smuggled in among the ballast of freight
ships, or hay used in packing), they find life here easy,
pleasant; as if to make up for lost time, they increase a
thousandfold. If we look closely at a daisy - and a lens is
necessary for any but the most superficial acquaintance - we
shall see that, far from being a single flower, it is literally a
host in itself. Each of the so-called white "petals" is a female
floret, whose open corolla has grown large, white, and showy, to
aid its sisters in advertising for insect visitors - a prominence
gained only by the loss of its stamens. The yellow center is
composed of hundreds of minute tubular florets huddled together
in a green cup as closely as they can be packed. Inside each of
these tiny yellow tubes stand the stamens, literally putting
their heads together. As the pistil within the ring of stamens
develops and rises through their midst, two little hair brushes
on its tip sweep the pollen from their anthers as a rounded brush
would remove the soot from a lamp chimney. Now the pollen is
elevated to a point where any insect crawling over the floret
must remove it. The pollen gone, the pistil now spreads its two
arms, that were kept tightly closed together while any danger of
self-fertilization lasted. Their surfaces become sticky, that
pollen brought from another flower may adhere to them. Notice
that the pistils in the white ray florets have no hairbrushes on
their tips, because, no stamens being there, there is no pollen
to be swept out. Because daisies are among the most conspicuous
of flowers, and have facilitated dining for their visitors by
offering them countless cups of refreshment that may be drained
with a minimum loss of time, almost every insect on wings alights
on them sooner or later. In short, they run their business on the
principle of a cooperative department store. Immense quantities
of the most vigorous, because cross-fertilized, seed being set in
every patch, small wonder that our fields are white with daisies
- a long and a merry life to them!
Since all flowers must once have passed through a white stage
before attaining gay colors, so evolution teaches, it is not
surprising that occasional reversions to the white type should be
found even among the brightest-hued species. Again, some white
flowers which are in a transition state show aspirations after
color, often so marked in individuals as to mislead one into
believing them products of a far advanced colored type. Also,
pale colors blanch under a summer sun. These facts must be borne
in mind, and the blue, pink, and yellow blossoms should be
investigated before the reader despairs of identifying a flower
not found in the white group.
Next: YELLOW AND ORANGE FLOWERS
Previous: COMMON DAISY WHITEWEED WHITE OR OXEYE DAISY LOVEME,
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