CLASS XIX. ORDER II. | BELLIS. 1089 
1. B. peren'nis, Linn. (Fig. 1296.) Common Daisy. Scape single 
flowered ; leaves spatulate, obovate, crenated; root creeping. 
English Botany, t. 424—English Flora, vol. ii. p. 448.—Hooker, 
British Flora, p. 307—Lindley, Synopsis, p. 148. 
Root of numerous long branched fibres, branched, and somewhat 
creeping at the crown. JZeaves numerous, all radical, depressed, 
obovate, spatulate, somewhat hairy, the margin entire, or more or 
less crenated. Scape erect, from two to four inches high, round, 
slender, hairy, single flowered, the base is sometimes branched, and 
bears one or a few leaves. Jnvolucre downy, its scales linear, obtuse. 
Florets numerous, those of the ray with a long ligulate lip, obtuse, 
entire, or notched at the end, white, or more or less tinged, of a 
delicate pink, those of the disk short, tubular, yellow, the limb five- 
cleft. Receptacle cone-shaped, hollow. /ruit obovate, compressed, 
smooth. 
Habitat—Pastures and meadows everywhere. 
Perennial; flowering from early spring to the end of summer. 
By cultivation the florets of the disk expand into ligulate corollas, 
like those of the ray, and form a pretty button-like flower, which in 
cottage gardens is much used for forming a border to the beds. The 
heads also by cultivation become proliferous: the parent head has a 
number of smaller ones on short stalks spreading around it, the ex- 
pansion of some of the florets of the disk. Though so common a 
plant in meadows and pastures, it appears to be refused by most 
cattle. 
The Daisy, or Day’s-eye, is one of the most simple and unobtrusive 
of our wild flowers, yet none has received more tributes of praise, 
or given birth to more poetical effusions. Chaucer, the “ Father of 
English Song,” in his rural enjoyments, so truly descriptive of rural 
scenes, and the feelings of an unsophisticated heart, amid the un- 
tutored, unchanged, and unchanging works of nature, thus speaks of 
the Daisy— 
“¢__ Now have I then eke this condition, 
That above all the flowres white and red, 
Such that men call Daisies in our town: 
To them I have so great affection, 
As a sad erst, when comen is the May, 
That in my bed there dawneth me no day, 
That I n’ am up and walking in the mead, 
To see this flower against the son ’ne spread.” 
And Wordsworth, “ Nature’s Poet,” who has not passed over the little 
gem without giving its meed of praise, says, from its being so gene- 
rally distributed— 
“‘ Bright flower, whose home is everywhere! 
A Pilgrim bold in Nature’s care, 
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