2023-05-30 11:14:00
When I was at a birthday party as a boy, a guessing game was played there. One question was: name as many plants as possible whose names start with an animal. After dandelion, snapdragon, mouse ear, piglet weed, tiger lily, hawkweed, frog bite, crab shaving, bracken fern, and all those orchids, I suggested the daisy.
Although I sometimes see flies sitting on daisies, probably to snack on the pollen, I don’t think the flower was named after fly larvae. A maggot is also a hayfield (meadow). On mowed grass, daisies bloom faster than anyone else. Once I mowed the grass around the daisies to spare them. The effect was counterproductive, the flowers that kindly winked at me from the green, gave up.
They bloom all year round
It could well be that daisy refers to hayfield. The name can also, I read somewhere, come from virgin-love, referring to the maternal virgin. A nymph-like girl with a wreath of daisies also has something virginal about it. In any case, Daisy is a sweet name for a sweet little flower, which is one of the five nominees for the National Flower of the Netherlands predicate.
Daisies are not only resistant to mowing, but also to walking and grazing. And against cold. In the spring they do it more profusely, but as long as it doesn’t freeze, daisies bloom all year round. In the winter I sometimes get messages from readers who shake their heads and say that the climate is changing a lot, they even saw daisies blooming. But even though it froze more often back then, they used to flower all year round; the Latin name of the plant is not for nothing perennis: everlasting, perennial.
Daisies may withstand mowing, grazing, treading and cold, but the intensive fertilization and processing of modern turbo grass is even going too far for them. In the meadow you see few daisies anymore.
Three times a week, biologist Koos Dijksterhuis writes about something that grows or blooms. Read his previous Nature Diaries here.
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