128 May Composed and Simple Flowers. 



just barely strong enough to support the narrow lanceo- 

 late leaves, and the thin, all but imponderable petals. 

 I confess, too, that I feel, a certain reasonable preference 

 for plants that carry well-cut leaves in the air to those 

 other plants which, like the daisy, have what botanists 

 call radical leaves, that never get much above the root, 

 and lie for the most part helplessly, making only a 

 sort of leaf-pattern on the green carpet of the earth. 

 Finally, notwithstanding my love and reverence for 

 Chaucer, and all the dear associations that we have 

 with the unpretending daisy, it seems to me that, when 

 we know enough of botany for ideas of structure to be 

 inextricably bound up with our conceptions, a composed 

 flower, or congeries of flowers like the daisy, must always 

 seem to have much less individuality than a simple 

 flower like the starwort ; and it seems easier to me to 

 fall in love with an object that is clearly individual than 

 with a collection of objects such as the florets of the 

 composites. This may be fanciful, but there is always a 

 great element of the fanciful in these things ; and it is 

 highly probable that Chaucer loved his favorite all the 

 better for not being aware that what he thought of as 

 a flower was, in reality, a sort of floral village, perched 

 on the top of a stalk. 



If the starwort looks like constellations on the land, 

 the water ranunculus covers at the same season the 

 shallow streams and ponds where it has fixed itself with 

 other constellations of its own. Early in the year its 

 wavy hair of green is wonderfully lustrous in the rapid, 

 limpid water : but that green, the most beautiful of all 



