White and Greenish 



Common Daisy; White-weed; White or Ox- 

 eye Daisy ; Love-me, Love-me-not 



{Chrysanthemum Leucanthemum) Thistle family 



Flower-heads — Disk florets yellow, tubular, 4 or 5 toothed, con- 

 taining stamens and pistil ; surrounded by white ray florets, 

 which are pistillate, fertile. Stent : Smooth, rarely branched, 

 I to 3 ft. high. Leaves : Mostly oblong in outline, coarsely 

 toothed and divided. 



Preferred Habitat — Meadows, pastures, roadsides, waste land. 



Floivering 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 — Betlis 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 unre- 

 stricted colonizing that it has in our vast unoccupied area. Most 



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