THE STORY OF THE DAISY 7 
appearance of the very many generations of daisies 
that will have their being when my short life is at an 
end. You know, we don’t live for ourselves; we 
live for the race. We can be seemingly cruel and 
unscrupulous. We won’t give an inch of ground to 
any other plant if we can avoid it, and if any plant 
does come within our reach we don’t hesitate to kill 
it if we can. I know we spoil your lawns, but then 
we must live as well as you. Your lawn-mowers 
cut off our heads, but although we don’t like to 
lose our heads, we can get on without them. We 
are superior to you in that respect ; when your heads 
are cut off you die, but we have other heads in store, 
and even if all our heads fail us we can still produce 
new daisy plants by budding. 
“We grow wherever we can. We like lawns, 
because our strongest competitors, the grasses, can’t 
get ahead of us because of the lawn-mower. We get 
on well in meadows where the cattle keep the grass 
short and leave us alone. But we get rather a 
shock in hayfields, where the grass grows long and 
overshadows us. The shock, however, is of short 
duration, for when the hay is cut we do well again, 
and while the hay was over us we had lots of good 
food stored away in our thick stems. 
“ By the way, we have some relatives, perhaps 
cousins, which manage very well among the hay. 
They have long stems, and can raise their flower- 
heads to, or even above, the level of the grasses. 
You know my cousins well ; they are quite familiar 
friends ; you call them ‘ ox-eye daisies,’ and those 
learned men, the great botanists, have given them 
the Latin name, Chrysanthemum leucanthemum.” 
