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.
Wednesday, June 1, 2011
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.
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.
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