Daisy

The common or English daisy is a small perennial of the aster family, native to western, central and northern Europe and now naturalised through much of the temperate world, the Americas and Australasia included. Its rounded, spoon-shaped leaves lie flat in rosettes, and from March to September single leafless stalks carry flower heads two or three centimetres wide: a ring of white rays, often tipped with red, around a yellow centre. The heads shut at night and open again in the morning, which gave the plant its name, a worn-down form of "day's eye"; Chaucer called it the eye of the day. It spreads through lawns so freely that mowing rarely clears it. Its young leaves, buds and petals have been eaten, it has a place in herbal medicine, and it was long known as bruisewort. Children have threaded daisy chains for generations, and in parts of Britain a chain was hung about a child's neck to keep the fairies from carrying it off, or elsewhere to win their blessing. In England, France and Belgium the petals were pulled one at a time to divine the course of a love affair. Women slept with a daisy root under the pillow to dream of love, and Cunningham says the same root can bring an absent lover home. In Bavaria, daisies picked around noon on Midsummer's Day were wrapped in paper and carried as protection on journeys.