COMPOSITE FAMILY COMPOSITAE 
OXEYE DAISY. MARGUERITE 
Chrysanthemum Leucanthemum L. 
Perhaps no plant is more properly thought of as both wild 
flower and weed than the Oxeye Daisy. This most beautiful field 
plant is known from Newfoundland and eastern Quebec to New 
Jersey and thereafter more rarely toward 
the southwest, and is often cultivated as a 
garden flower, usually under the name 
Marguerite. In some places it is justly 
considered a most pernicious weed, for 
where extremely abundant in hay fields 
it seriously injures the quality of the hay. 
It is perennial and when established may 
spread rapidly. 
The stems are smooth, slightly 
branched and 1-3 feet high. The obovate, 
oblong or spatulate basal leaves, in a mat, 
are long petioled and coarsely toothed or 
lobed; the stem leaves are narrowly 
oblong, mostly sessile and partly clasping, 
1-3 inches long, and pinnately cut or 
toothed though the uppermost are very 
small and almost entire. 
The heads are few or solitary and 1-2 
inches broad on long naked peduncles, 
from June to August. The mostly smooth 
bracts of the involucre are narrow and 
marked by brown lines along the dry, 
thin margins. There are 20-30 spreading 
white ray flowers, slightly 2 or 3-toothed. 
The disk flowers are bright yellow. Both 
kinds of flowers produce akenes having 
no pappus, and both are visited by many 
kinds of bees and butterflies. 
The Costmary, or Mint Geranium, Chrysanthemum Balsamita L. 
var. tanacetoides Boiss., is a very fragrant-leaved immigrant peren- 
nial which has no ray flowers. The toothed oblong leaves often have 
a pair of lateral lobes at the base, and contain the plant’s aromatic 
principle. The upper leaves are sessile. The Costmary blooms 
through the summer, principally along roadsides near old dwellings, 
and occasionally in colonies. 
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