6. Lingua Floreale

There is, or there was, a language of flowers. It's more technically a protocol of symbols, but isn't this true of all languages? By the language of flowers if you give a gal a nosegay of dahlias, it says you think she's got elegance and dignity. Do you want her to be faithful? Give her some blue violets. A scarlet geranium somehow insists upon the recipient justice shall be done unto you.

All these were coded in manuals, all of which seem to have stemmed (mind the pun) from Les Langage des Fleurs, by Charlotte de Latour (a nom de plume), originally published in 1819. And like all languages, this one's got a grammar:

The first rule is to find a flower that appropriately expresses a thought, and it is enough to invert the flower to express the contrary: for example, a rosebud with its thorns and leaves intact means: I'm afraid, but I hope. If one wears the same rosebud in the reverse, this means: do not fear nor hope.

Ouch. Likewise, a flower's placement on the body has much to say about its intended meaning. "The marigold, for example, placed on the head, means pain of mind; on the heart, broken heart; the breast, ennui."

The daisy signifies innocence. If you ask Louise Cortambert (the femme behind the nom) why this is the case, she will tell you that it's after the premature death of Celtic hero Oscar (codified by poet James MacPherson in The Poems of Ossian). Oscar, having died "before the disease of old age" could mar him, worked his heavenly powers to spread a new purple flower over the land, which his beloved, Malvina, cried upon and turned white. Thus was born the daisy.

There's a problem here in that the daisy appears nowhere in MacPherson's text. Thus—perhaps?—the U.S. translation of de Latour's book replaces this invented myth with one concerning Belides, "one of the nymphs called Dryads," who was turned into a daisy by the gods so as to escape an ardent suitor, thus retaining her innocence. But as any student of Greek myth can tell you, Belides is a name given not to a nymph, but to a group of fifty sisters betrothed to fifty brothers. The Belides. That this word is similar to Bellis, the daisy's genus, is convenient, but tells us nothing about why innocence is the meaning of the daisy.

And maybe there's nothing to tell. In The Legend of Good Women, Chaucer invented his own origin in writing that Queen Alcestis, another mythic figure, turned into a daisy upon giving herself to Death so that her husband might live. To the Greeks she merely died, but to Chaucer she transformed. But where does this myth get us? Alcestis' actions are more loyal or sacrificial than innocent.

The arbitrariness of these things. Maybe roses retain their sense of love and affection. But were I to call my local florist and get shipped your way a mess of daffodils, would you know I wanted you to return my love? Not without some giftshop guidebook you wouldn't. And yet it's clear that something has been said, something maybe otherwise unsayable. From that U.S. translation:

[N]o spoken word can approach ... the delicacy of sentiment to be inferred from a flower seasonably offered; [and] the softest impressions may be thus conveyed without offence, and even profound grief alleviated, at a moment when the most tuneful voice would grate harshly on the ear....

It's much like patron saints. The lowest, chintziest way to appreciate them is through the thoroughness of their collective patronage. Loving that Dismas is the patron saint of undertakers and thieves is very far removed from loving Saint Dismas, who died guilty on a cross next to Jesus and asked to be remembered in heaven.

That the daisy means innocence means very little about the daisy. It's important to remember that innocence is not ignorance, that while the latter comes from the Latin not knowing, innocence means not harming. With ignorance, the implication is that one should know, or one ought to have taken the time to find out. We forgive the innocent their innocence. We humor them.

No chance of flower language ever being resurrected. That a jury might award daisies, Bachelor-like, to the acquitted!

5. Appeals to Authority

The daisy's nowhere in the Bible.

Shakespeare's got just five daisies in his complete works (compared to 105 roses), one most famously part of the funereal garland Ophelia braids before drowning, made

Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,
But our cold maids do dead men's fingers call them[.]

The amount of titles the Library of Congress lists under its subject heading Daisies is two. Just two: Edith Beach's book, Among the Daisies: Poems Old and New from 1884, and John Sutton's Plantfinder's Guide to Daisies from 2001. Thus ends the list. Compare with the daisy's sister flowers. The number of titles under roses is 335. The number under orchids is 251. Even weirder flowers fare far better. Twenty books on daffodils, twenty on violets. A whopping fifty-five books written on dahlias, of all things. Even the nasturtium warrants three separate titles. Sunflowers, lilies, irises, tulips. Carnations. Dandelions. They all rank far higher.

What exists, then, is a certain lack of expertise. I asked Ben, an old friend more passionate about gardening than anyone I know, for his thoughts on the daisy. "A daisy, in a lot of ways, is an 'it's good enough' kind of flower," he says.

Pretty, but like our idea of a perfect woman—blond and blue eyes (maybe plants have just been perfected too much anymore). I confess I have a white shasta daisy in my garden, but it always looks a bit slutty in the corner, a little cheap, that cover model who has had too much photoshopping done so she doesn't look quite real and so I want her less now, and want a biker chick more, something wild and free and with grit / personality.

Pity the daisy. Nobody wants to date her.

4. Monoliths

In 1892, years before Fitzgerald was born, a man named Harry Dacre penned a little ditty called "Daisy Bell" about an unobtained beloved. "Whether she loves me or loves me not," Dacre writes, "sometimes it's hard to tell." Here's its refrain:

Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do!
I'm half crazy, all for the love of you!
It won't be a stylish marriage,
I can't afford a carriage,
But you'll look sweet on the seat
Of a bicycle built for two.

Seventy years later, some engineers at Bell Laboratories took an IBM 704 computer that filled a tank of a room and used the analog vocoder voice-synthesis system to make the computer sing. You can hear it online. The accompaniment begins solo. It sounds like your grandma pecking something out on a Sears Silvertone Organ, and but her pedalwork’s off. Then the music turns into the sort of calliopeic oompah you hear tooting from old carnival rides for tots. And then the vocals kick in. The timbre’s matched to some winged thing buzzing at a screen. Its vowels are clipped, as though Doppler-affected. It’s Jamaican vowelling, and maybe it’s just the power of Dacre’s song but the performance is inescapably charming.

Why "Daisy Bell"? Why not the national anthem or "Duke of Earl"? Here's musicologist David Ewen: "A good deal of [Dacre's] song's popularity was due to the fact that in 1892 the bicycle was becoming popular with women, having just been made easier and safer to handle." In this way is "Daisy Bell" the "Video Killed the Radio Star" of its time. Witness the wordplay of the song's third verse:

I will stand by you in "wheel" or woe,
Daisy, Daisy!
You'll be the bell(e) which I'll ring, you know!
Sweet little Daisy Bell!
You'll take the "lead" in each "trip" we take,
Then, if I don't do well,
I will permit you to use the brake,
My beautiful Daisy Bell!

Odds are if you know this song you know it from Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. Co-writer Arthur C. Clarke heard the Bell Labs performance and wrote it in to the scene where Dave Bowman disconnects HAL's memory modules. "Dave," the computer says, before it starts hallucinating. "My mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it." In college I cleverly had this as a WAV file to play during my dorm computer's Windows 95 shutdown. It took whole ages to play through. Now I use Macs, and this essay on daisies is being composed in the window of a blog-publishing service. These are not technologies I'm enamored with.

An afterword. In 2009, the National Recording Preservation Board added twenty-five new sound recordings to the Library of Congress's National Recording Registry, making them fit for preservation at the Packard Campus for Audio-Visual Preservation in Culpeper, Virginia. "Daisy Bell", as performed in Bell Labs, was among them, as were Patti Smith's "Horses", R.E.M.'s "Radio Free Europe", and Tupac Shakur's "Dear Mama". It is the earliest known recording of computer-synthesized speech, and so it's been canonized. Saint Daisy Bell.

3. Roll Call

Some famous Daisys:

1. Daisy Miller
2. Daisy Duke
3. Daisy Duck
4. Daisy Bumstead

Then there's Daisy Buchanan, Nick Carraway's second cousin once removed. "I love to see you at my table, Nick," she tells him that first evening they reunite. "You remind me of a—of a rose, an absolute rose."

This is untrue, Nick writes. I am not even faintly like a rose.

The question follows, is Daisy even faintly like a daisy? All we get of her face is that it's sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth. Much more is said about her low thrilling voice.

It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down, as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.... [T]here was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: the singing compulsion, a whispered “Listen,” a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour.

Her character has some root in Ginevra King, a rich girl back in Chicago whom Fitzgerald either loved or merely flirted with through correspondence. They sent each other photographs—it was analog sexting during wartime. Ginevra could be impossible. "Yours Fickely sometimes but Devotedly at present -- Ginevra," is how she signed one letter, and then she up and married an enormously wealthy man.

In her tawdriness is Daisy a daisy, p-paralyzed with happiness.

2. Repudiation

I don't care for flowers. Once, in Germany, I mentioned to my guest mother that I couldn't really smell flowers. Ich kann nicht Blumen riechen, I probably said. The words broke her heart. She insisted I see a doctor when I got back to the States, that I was missing as much of the stuff of life as music or sunshine.

Years later, I know it wasn't true. It's not, these days, so much that I can't smell flowers as it is that my sensing them olfactorily connects to no fond memories. Flowers smell like funerals and hospital visits. It's hard to find a fondness.

If forced at gunpoint to pick a flower to look at for the rest of my life I'd weigh my options. I'd eye the gun, eye this deranged forcer of others' fate. This decider. I'd look at the ground to say, "I don't know, a snapdragon?"

You can't fiddle with a daisy. Not without stripping it bare.

1. Origins

What we know as the daisy is known by horticulturalists as Bellis perennis. It is the Common Daisy, the white-ringed things young girls once plucked the petals from, one-by-one, to find he loved them not. It is the sunny-side-up egg of the plant kingdom. The head of the common daisy—like your dry cleaner, or the zoo—opens in the morning and closes back up at night. Hence its name: dæges ēage, Old English for "the day's eye".

Turns out it's wrong to think of girls plucking petals from the head of this flower. For starters, boys do it, too. Or, at least, this one did, verifying the rough-sketch "love" of a theoretical and (I'd gradually come to realize) unhankered-for She. But also: the common daisy is not a flower of many petals, it is a flower of many flowers. A what's called composite flower. Each white floret plucked from the head is a flower in its own right, much like each of the seed heads huffed from the stem of an aged dandelion—another member of the aster family.

In this way and in one other is the dandelion a cousin of the daisy. Mow right over the daisies you find on the lawn, and those Asteraceae will sprout right back. A daisy, then, is a weed—if you know how to look at it.