Part 53

Flowering Season--June-November.

Distribution--Throughout North America, except in circumpolar regions.

“Naturalized from Europe, and widely distributed as a weed in Asia, Africa, and Australasia” (Britton and Brown’s “Flora”). Little wonder the camomile encompasses the earth, for it imitates the triumphant daisy, putting into practice those business methods of the modern department store, by which the composite horde have become the most successful strugglers for survival.

Dog, used as a prefix by several of the plant’s folk-names, implies contempt for its worthlessness. It is quite another species, the Garden Camomile (A. nobilis), which furnishes the apothecary with those flowers which, when steeped into a bitter, aromatic tea, have been supposed for generations to make a superior tonic and blood purifier.

Common Daisy; White-weed; White or Ox-eye Daisy; Marguerite; Love-me, Love-me-not

Chrysanthemum Leucanthemum

Flower-heads--Disk florets yellow, tubular, 4 or 5 toothed, containing stamens and pistil; surrounded by white ray florets, which are pistillate, fertile. Stem: Smooth, rarely branched, 1 to 3 ft. high. Leaves: Mostly oblong in outline, coarsely toothed and divided.

Preferred Habitat--Meadows, pastures, roadsides, waste land.

Flowering Season--May-November.

Distribution--Throughout the United States and Canada; not so common in the South and West.

Myriads and myriads of daisies, whitening our fields as if a belated blizzard had covered them with a snowy mantle in June, fill the farmer with dismay, the flower-lover with rapture. When vacation days have come; when chains and white-capped old women are to be made of daisies by happy children turned out of schoolrooms into meadows; when pretty maids, like Goethe’s Marguerite, tell their fortunes by the daisy “petals”; when music bubbles up in a cascade of ecstasy from the throats of bobolinks nesting among the daisies, timothy, and clover; when the blue sky arches over the fairest scenes the year can show, and all the world is full of sunshine and happy promises of fruition, must we Americans always go to English literature for a song to fit our joyous mood?

“When daisies pied, and violets blue, And lady-smocks all silver white, And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue, Do paint the meadows with delight--”

sang Shakespeare. His lovely suggestion of an English spring recalls no familiar picture to American minds. No more does Burns’s.

“Wee, modest, crimson-tippit flower.”

Shakespeare, Burns, Chaucer, Wordsworth, and all the British poets who have written familiar lines about the daisy, extolled a quite different flower from ours--Bellis perennis, the little pink and white blossom that hugs English turf as if it loved it--the true day’s-eye, for it closes at nightfall and opens with the dawn.

Now, what is the secret of the large, white daisy’s triumphal conquest of our territory? A naturalized immigrant from Europe and Asia, how could it so quickly take possession? In the over-cultivated Old World no weed can have half the chance for unrestricted colonizing that it has in our vast, unoccupied area. Most of our weeds are naturalized foreigners, not natives. Once released from the harder conditions of struggle at home (the seeds bring safely smuggled in among the ballast of freight ships, or hay used in packing), they find life here easy, pleasant; as if to make up for lost time, they increase a thousandfold. If we look closely at a daisy--and a lens is necessary for any but the most superficial acquaintance--we shall see that, far from being a single flower, it is literally a host in itself. Each of the so-called white “petals” is a female floret, whose open corolla has grown large, white, and showy, to aid its sisters in advertising for insect visitors--a prominence gained only by the loss of its stamens. The yellow centre is composed of hundreds of minute tubular florets huddled together in a green cup as closely as they can be packed. Inside each of these tiny yellow tubes stand the stamens, literally putting their heads together. As the pistil within the ring of stamens develops and rises through their midst, two little hair brushes on its tip sweep the pollen from their anthers as a rounded brush would remove the soot from a lamp chimney. Now the pollen is elevated to a point where any insect crawling over the floret must remove it. The pollen gone, the pistil now spreads its two arms, that were kept tightly closed together while any danger of self-fertilization lasted. Their surfaces become sticky, that pollen brought from another flower may adhere to them. Notice that the pistils in the white ray florets have no hair brushes on their tips, because, no stamens being there, there is no pollen to be swept out. Because daisies are among the most conspicuous of flowers, and have facilitated dining for their visitors by offering them countless cups of refreshment that may be drained with a minimum loss of time, almost every insect on wings alights on them sooner or later. In short, they run their business on the principle of a cooperative department store. Immense quantities of the most vigorous, because cross-fertilized, seed being set in every patch, small wonder that our fields are white with daisies--a long and a merry life to them!

Tansy; Bitter-buttons

Tanacetum vulgare

Flower-heads--Small, round, of tubular florets only, packed within a depressed involucre, and borne in flat-topped corymbs. Stem: 1-1/2 to 3 ft. tall, leafy. Leaves: Deeply and pinnately cleft into narrow, toothed divisions; strong scented.

Preferred Habitat--Roadsides; commonly escaped from gardens.

Flowering Season--July-September.

Distribution--Nova Scotia, westward to Minnesota, south to Missouri and North Carolina. Naturalized from Europe.

“In the spring time, are made with the leaves hereof newly sprung up, and with eggs, cakes or Tansies which be pleasant in taste and goode for the Stomache,” wrote quaint old Gerarde. That these were popular dainties in the seventeenth century we further know through Pepys who made a “pretty dinner” for some guests, to wit: “A brace of stewed carps, six roasted chickens, and a jowl of salmon, hot, for the first course; a tansy, and two neat’s tongues, and cheese, the second.” Cole’s “Art of Simpling,” published in 1656, assures maidens that tansy leaves laid to soak in buttermilk for nine days “maketh the complexion very fair.” Tansy tea, in short, cured every ill that flesh is heir to, according to the simple faith of medieval herbalists--a faith surviving in some old women even to this day. The name is said to be a corruption of athanasia, derived from two Greek words meaning immortality. When some monks in reading Lucian came across the passage where Jove, speaking of Ganymede to Mercury, says, “Take him hence, and when he has tasted immortality let him return to us,” their literal minds inferred that this plant must have been what Ganymede tasted, hence they named it athanasia! So great credence having been given to its medicinal powers in Europe, it is not strange the colonists felt they could not live in the New World without tansy. Strong-scented pungent tufts topped with bright yellow buttons--runaways from old gardens--are a conspicuous feature along many a roadside leading to colonial homesteads.

Common or Plumed Thistle

Cirsium

Is land fulfilling the primal curse because it brings forth thistles? So thinks the farmer, no doubt, but not the goldfinches which daintily feed among the fluffy seeds, nor the bees, nor the “painted lady,” which may be seen in all parts of the world where thistles grow, hovering about the beautiful rose-purple flowers. In the prickly cradle of leaves, the caterpillar of this thistle butterfly weaves a web around its main food store.

When the Danes invaded Scotland, they stole a silent night march upon the Scottish camp by marching barefoot; but a Dane inadvertently stepped on a thistle, and his sudden, sharp cry, arousing the sleeping Scots, saved them and their country; hence the Scotch emblem.

From July to November blooms the Common, Burr, Spear, Plume, Bank, Horse, Bull, Blue, Button, Bell, or Roadside Thistle (C. lanceolatum or Carduus lanceolatus), a native of Europe and Asia, now a most thoroughly naturalized American from Newfoundland to Georgia, westward to Nebraska. Its violet flower-heads, about an inch and a half across, and as high as wide, are mostly solitary at the ends of formidable branches, up which few crawling creatures venture. But in the deep tube of each floret there is nectar secreted for the flying visitor who can properly transfer pollen from flower to flower. Such a one suffers no inconvenience from the prickles, but, on the contrary, finds a larger feast saved for him because of them. Dense, matted, wool-like hairs, that cover the bristling stems of most thistles, make climbing mighty unpleasant for ants, which ever delight in pilfering sweets. Perhaps one has the temerity to start upward.