
20 FIVE CONSPICUOUS PLANT FAMILIES. 
themselves : “ Brighten up the earth, appear in every waste 
corner, wave and bend with the breeze. Things are looking 
humdrum here; make the earth a merry carnival of dancing 
colour.” | 
The flowers are rather difficult for a beginner to analyse with 
reference to their species, of which there are over ten thou- 
sand. It is, however, not so much what one learns in books 
about them as it is what one finds out. They may be easily 
recognised by bearing in mind that the flowers are closely 
packed together in heads that are surrounded by an involucre. 
The individual flowers are tubular or ligulate, as in the thistle 
and dandelion, and again both tubular and ligulate flowers are 
arranged in the same head. In this case they are called ray 
and disk flowers. The common field daisy is a well-known 
illustration of the latter. 

