I have long been drawn to daisies – scattered through meadows, waving out of walls, made into chains of flowers by kids, worn as crowns by country queens. They are among the first up and out in spring, spangling summer roadsides. Lipstick-kissed, clustered in grass; ox-eyed, tall and swaying in front of our beach hut window.
I have a pot or two on the rooftop, though they colonise the others. They grow out of bricks and mortar and cracks in tiles, a miraculous hold on life and moisture where there shouldn’t be any. They are a first flower, the sort that children draw, simple petals, central stem. Easy on the eye and to understand. They are also a source of fights with my wife when she wants to mow summer grass. I fight for their life though I know it’s futile: her neatly trimmed lawn (my nascent wild meadow) will not long be denied.
We will be back in Denmark soon, filling our bicycle baskets with flowers: ox-eye daisies, cornflowers, poppies lining the edges of the wheat and barley fields that the farmers leave free. We’ll fill tall jugs with them, a casual late-summer mess, a wildflower harvest at harvest time. We will bring the outside in.
We’ll have vases and jars and jugs on every surface. We will deck the terrace table where we eat and sit and read till the midges and sea mist drive us in. These are less bouquets than bucketloads, like church dressing for a wedding.
Alongside dandelions and buttercups, daisies are a fairy flower, wild though semi-domesticated, the name you would call a cow. There’s a children’s game attached to the flower too: she loves me, she loves me not, originally from French, effeuiller la marguerite.
I’ll divine my luck and love by petals as I pluck them one by one.
Allan Jenkins’s Plot 29 (4th Estate, £9.99) is out now. Order it for £8.49 from guardianbookshop.com
