7 6 
PLANT-LORE OF SHAKESPEARE 
Batsies . 1 
(1) When Daisies pied, and Violets, &c. 
Love's Labour s Lost, v. 2, 904. (See Cuckoo-buds.) 
(2) Let us 
Find out the prettiest Daisied plot we can, 
And make him with our pikes and partizans 
A gra \Q — Cymbeline, iv. 2, 397. 
(3) There’s a Daisy.— Hamlet , iv. 5, 183. 
(4) There with fantastic garlands did she come 
Of Crow-flowers, Nettles, Daisies, and Long Purples. 
Ibid., iv. 7, 169. 
(5) Without the bed her other faire hand was 
On the green coverlet; whose perfect white 
Show’d like an April Daisy on the Grass.— Lucrece , 393. 
(6) Daisies smel-lesse, yet most quaint. 
Two Noble Kinsmen , Introd. song. 
Shakespeare’s notices of the Daisy are so few that, though 
we are glad that he did not leave it altogether unnoticed, we 
cannot rank him with Chaucer as a daisy-worshipper. Chaucer’s 
admiration for the flower was unbounded— 
“ Of all the floures in the mede 
Then love I most those floures white and redde, 
Such that men call daisies in our town. 
• o • 0 • • 
Alas, that I ne had English rhyme or prose 
Suffisaunt this floure to praise aright.” 
And he expresses his admiration in many passages, some of 
great beauty and interest. But after his time the poets have 
very little to say of the Daisy. It was not that they despised 
its beauty, for whenever they do speak of it they always speak 
of it with admiration, but its very commonness made them pass 
1 This account of the Daisy is abridged from a paper by myself on the 
Daisy, originally written for the Bath Natural History Field Club, then 
published in “The Garden,” and in the first and second editions of this 
book published in an appendix. 
