Very early in a meadow’s morning, its daisies are still abed, all wrapped up like so many little white peas on stalks. Their rays are lashes, shut tight over irises that open sun‑yellow at the break of day. For now, the green bracts are prominent, making even saw-toothed bands around the outside, the protective cup to the flower’s egg.
After not so many minutes, some daisies have half unfurled, making me think of a human fist unclenching, fingers pointing skywards. I don’t see the opening to full stretch, only the finality of flat rosettes and the full exposure of the central discs, each beaded like a compound eye. Each has its double frill, the rays radiating as sprays of exultation, a shout to the light. And the daisy is no cookie-cutter plant. In every daisied meadow or lawn, there are some that stand out from the rest, their rays scarlet-tipped or flushed as if by a spray can. We might imagine a mischievous paint‑pot pixie dipping and dabbing marks at random. Science has its explanation in anthocyanins, colour-making pigments that might express themselves or not, thanks to variable factors such as soil pH, light and genetics.
“The daisy is a happy flower”, wrote the poet John Clare, though it seems that in the domestic sphere we prefer misery, for few allow its beauty to sully their lawn. Nor is the desire to strip them out a new phenomenon. In the back lawn of a Hull terrace more than a century ago, the father of the future aviator Amy Johnson paid his daughter to pluck out the joy and gave her a penny for every hundred she picked.
Buried inside this flower are the poetic imaginings of distant forebears on these islands who were trying to make sense of their world. And in a single word we can hear a medieval voice – and even how they spoke its name. Today we call the plant “daisy”, but once, with the rising of the sun, an adult might have walked through a field such as this and answered their accompanying child’s question with “That flower? Why, that be the day’s eye.”
• Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian’s Country Diary, 2018-2024 is published by Guardian Faber; order at guardianbookshop.com and get a 15% discount
