IMPROVEMENT OF WILD FLOWERING PLANTS. 
65 
brethren’s aim, at present, should be to procure, if possible, blue 
Dahlias, Tree Poeonias, and Calceolarias. The means to be 
employed to accomplish, or at least attempt to obtain such results, 
will often be adverted to in the course of our journal. 
But to return to the improvement of wild plants, we may first 
notice one of the most common and most humble. The Daisy 
(Beilis perennis) is chiefly a spring flower, though it may be seen, 
more or less plentiful, in all months of the year ; embroidering 
every footpath and every piece of old pasture. This little 
“ crimson-tipped flower” is, in its wild state, very uniform in 
size and colour ; and, as it is very prolific in seed, it soon becomes 
a formidable usurper on turf laid down for the sustenance of 
sheep and other cattle. Whether some wild individual acciden¬ 
tally showed signs of variation, and so attracted the notice of 
some lover of flowers who might probably introduce it into his 
garden ; or whether some florist, aware of the practicability of 
improving such wild flowers by art, tried his skill on this plant; is 
now unknown : but the present appearance of our cultivated Daisies 
shows decidedly that some pains have been taken with them. 
The richer or more suitable compost of the garden has a direct 
influence on the vital energy of the Daisy ; it not only becomes 
more luxuriant in its foliage and stature, but the normal character 
of the flowers themselves is changed ; for they are composite, 
(that is, a crowd of florets are seated together on a common 
receptacle,) those forming the yellow disk, being all bisexual, have 
no protruding corollas, and the florets of the ray or margin, being 
all unisexual and female, have each strap-shaped diverging 
corollas. Now these female marginal florets being fecundified by 
the stamens of the disk, were considered by Linnaeus to be super¬ 
fluous, and hence ^the title of the order (Superflua) in which the 
Daisy is placed. But culture produces other remarkable changes; 
the numerous florets of the disk are almost all changed into 
females, each having a corolla and crowded together from the 
centre outwards, forming the double Daisy, of which there are two 
curious sorts ; namely, the piped, or double quilled, and the pro¬ 
liferous, or hen-and-cliicken variety. The latter is a remarkable 
departure from the natural structure. In the wild habit, each 
flower has its own peduncle, but in this cultivated sort the 
peduncle becomes branched into pedicils; each of which bearing a 
perfect and very diminutive flower at the point, arranged round 
VOL, I. NC. III. K 
