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.
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