The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare Part 119

And the following must be about the same date--

"The pretty Daisy which doth show Her love to Phbus, bred her woe; (Who joys to see his cheareful face, And mournes when he is not in place)-- 'Alacke! alacke! alacke!' quoth she, 'There's none that ever loves like me.'"

_The Deceased Maiden's Lover_--Roxburghe Ballads, i, 341.

I am not surprised to find that Milton barely mentions the Daisy. His knowledge of plants was very small compared to Shakespeare's, and seems to have been, for the most part, derived from books. His descriptions of plants all savour more of study than the open air. I only know of two places in which he mentions the Daisy. In the "l'Allegro" he speaks of "Meadows trim with Daisies pied," and in another place he speaks of "Daisies trim." But I am surprised to find the Daisy overlooked by two such poets as Robert Herrick and George Herbert. Herrick sang of flowers most sweetly, few if any English poets have sung of them more sweetly, but he has little to say of the Daisy. He has one poem, indeed, addressed specially to a Daisy, but he simply uses the little flower, and not very successfully, as a peg on which to hang the praises of his mistress. He uses it more happily in describing the pleasures of a country life--

"Come live with me and thou shalt see The pleasures I'll prepare for thee, What sweets the country can afford, Shall bless thy bed and bless thy board.

. . . Thou shalt eat The paste of Filberts for thy bread, With cream of Cowslips b.u.t.tered; Thy feasting tables shall be hills, With Daisies spread and Daffodils."

And again--

"Young men and maids meet, To exercise their dancing feet, Tripping the comely country round, With Daffodils and Daisies crowned."

George Herbert had a deep love for flowers, and a still deeper love for finding good Christian lessons in the commonest things about him. He delights in being able to say--

"Yet can I mark how herbs below Grow green and gay;"

but I believe he never mentions the Daisy.

Of the poets of the seventeenth century I need only make one short quotation from Dryden--

"And then the band of flutes began to play, To which a lady sang a tirelay: And still at every close she would repeat The burden of the song--'The Daisy is so sweet, The Daisy is so sweet'--when she began The troops of knights and dames continued on The consort; and the voice so charmed my ear And soothed my soul that it was heaven to hear."

I need not dwell on the other poets of the seventeenth century. In most of them a casual allusion to the Daisy may be found, but little more.

Nor need I dwell at all on the poets of the eighteenth century. In the so-called Augustan age of poetry, the Daisy could not hope to attract any attention. It was the correct thing if they had to speak of the country to speak of the "Daisied" or "Daisy-spangled" meads, but they could not condescend to any nearer approach to the little flower. If they had they would have found that they had chosen their epithet very badly. I never yet saw a "Daisy-spangled" meadow.[370:1] The flowers may be there, but the long Gra.s.ses effectually hide them. And so I come _per saltum_ to the end of the eighteenth century, and at once to Burns, who brought the Daisy again into notice. He thus regrets the uprooting of the Daisy by his plough--

"Wee, modest, crimson-tipped flower, Thou'st met me in an evil hour; For I must crush amongst the stour Thy slender stem.

To spare thee now is past my power, Thou bonny gem.

Cold blew the bitter, biting north, Upon thy humble birth, Yet cheerfully thou venturest forth Amid the storm, Scarce reared above the Parent-earth Thy tender form.

The flaunting flowers our gardens yield High sheltering woods and walks must shield; But thou, between the random bield Of clod or stone, Adorn'st the rugged stubble field, Unseen, alone.

There, in thy scanty mantle clad, Thy snowy bosom sunward spread, Thou lift'st thy una.s.suming head In humble guise; But now the share uptears thy bed, And low thou lies!"

With Burns we may well join Clare, another peasant poet from Northamptonshire, whose poems are not so much known as they deserve to be. His allusions to wild flowers always mark his real observation of them, and his allusions to the Daisy are frequent; thus--

"Smiling on the sunny plain The lovely Daisies blow, Unconscious of the careless feet That lay their beauties low."

Again, alluding to his own obscurity--

"Green turfs allowed forgotten heap, Is all that I shall have, Save that the little Daisies creep To deck my humble grave."

Again, in his description of evening, he does not omit to notice the closing of the Daisy at sunset--

"Now the blue fog creeps along, And the birds forget their song; Flowers now sleep within their hoods, Daisies b.u.t.ton into buds."

And so we come to Wordsworth, whose love of the Daisy almost equalled Chaucer's. His allusions and addresses to the Daisy are numerous, but I have only s.p.a.ce for a small selection. First, are two stanzas from a long poem specially to the Daisy--

"When soothed awhile by milder airs, Thee Winter in the garland wears, That thinly shades his few gray hairs, Spring cannot shun thee.

While Summer fields are thine by right, And Autumn, melancholy wight, Doth in thy crimson head delight When rains are on thee.

Child of the year that round dost run Thy course, bold lover of the sun, And cheerful when thy day's begun As morning leveret.

Thy long-lost praise thou shalt regain, Dear shalt thou be to future men, As in old time, thou not in vain Art nature's favourite."

The other poem from Wordsworth that I shall read to you is one that has received the highest praise from all readers, and by Ruskin (no mean critic, and certainly not always given to praises) is described as "two delicious stanzas, followed by one of heavenly imagination."[372:1] The poem is "An Address to the Daisy"--

"A nun demure--of holy port; A sprightly maiden--of love's court, In thy simplicity the sport Of all temptations.

A queen in crown of rubies drest, A starveling in a scanty vest, Are all, as seems to suit thee best, Thy appellations.

I see thee glittering from afar, And then thou art a pretty star, Not quite so fair as many are In heaven above thee.

Yet like a star with glittering crest, Self-poised in air thou seem'st to rest; Let peace come never to his rest Who shall reprove thee.

Sweet flower, for by that name at last, When all my reveries are past, I call thee, and to that cleave fast.

Sweet silent creature, That breath'st with me in sun and air; Do thou, as thou art wont, repair My heart with gladness, and a share Of thy meek nature."

With these beautiful lines I might well conclude my notices of the poetical history of the Daisy, but, to bring it down more closely to our own times, I will remind you of a poem by Tennyson, ent.i.tled "The Daisy." It is a pleasant description of a southern tour brought to his memory by finding a dried Daisy in a book. He says--

"We took our last adieu, And up the snowy Splugen drew, But ere we reached the highest summit, I plucked a Daisy, I gave it you, It told of England then to me, And now it tells of Italy."

Thus I have picked several pretty flowers of poetry for you from the time of Chaucer to our own. I could have made the posy fifty-fold larger, but I could, probably, have found no flowers for the posy more beautiful, or more curious, than these few.

I now come to the botany of the Daisy. The Daisy belongs to the immense family of the Compositae, a family which contains one-tenth of the flowering plants of the world, and of which nearly 10,000 species are recorded. In England the order is very familiar, as it contains three of our commonest kinds, the Daisy, the Dandelion, and the Groundsel. It may give some idea of the large range of the family when we find that there are some 600 recorded species of the Groundsel alone, of which eleven are in England. I shall not weary you with a strictly scientific description of the Daisy, but I will give you instead Rousseau's well-known description. It is fairly accurate, though not strictly scientific: "Take," he says, "one of those little flowers, which cover all the pastures, and which every one knows by the name of Daisy. Look at it well, for I am sure you would never have guessed from its appearance that this flower, which is so small and delicate, is really composed of between two and three hundred other flowers, all of them perfect, that is, each of them having its corolla, stamens, pistil, and fruit; in a word, as perfect in its species as a flower of the Hyacinth or Lily. Every one of these leaves, which are white above and red underneath, and form a kind of crown round the flower, appearing to be nothing more than little petals, are in reality so many true flowers; and every one of those tiny yellow things also which you see in the centre, and which at first you have perhaps taken for nothing but stamens, are real flowers. . . . Pull out one of the white leaves of the flower; you will think at first that it is flat from one end to the other, but look carefully at the end by which it was fastened to the flower, and you will see that this end is not flat, but round and hollow in the form of a tube, and that a little thread ending in two horns issues from the tube. This thread is the forked style of the flower, which, as you now see, is flat only at top. Next look at the little yellow things in the middle of the flower, and which, as I have told you, are all so many flowers; if the flower is sufficiently advanced, you will see some of them open in the middle and even cut into several parts. These are the monopetalous corollas. . . . . This is enough to show you by the eye the possibility that all these small affairs, both white and yellow, may be so many distinct flowers, and this is a constant fact" (Quoted in Lindley's "Ladies' Botany," vol. i.)[374:1]

But Rousseau does not mention one feature which I wish to describe to you, as I know few points in botany more beautiful than the arrangement by which the Daisy is fertilized. In the centre of each little flower is the style surrounded closely by the anthers. The end of the style is divided, but, as long as it remains below among the anthers, the two lips are closed. The anthers are covered, more or less, with pollen; the style has its outside surface bristling with stiff hairs. In this condition it would be impossible for the pollen to reach the interior (stigmatic) surfaces of the divided style, but the style rises, and as it rises it brushes off the pollen from the anthers around it. Its lips are closed till it has risen well above the whole flower, and left the anthers below; then it opens, showing its broad stigmatic surface to receive pollen from other flowers, and distribute the pollen it has brushed off, not to itself (which it could not do), but to other flowers around it. By this provision no flower fertilizes itself, and those of you who are acquainted with Darwin's writings will know how necessary this provision may be in perpetuating flowers. The Daisy not only produces double flowers, but also the curious proliferous flower called Hen and Chickens, or Childing Daisies, or Jackanapes on Horseback. These are botanically very interesting flowers, and though I, on another occasion, drew your attention to the peculiarity, I cannot pa.s.s it over in a paper specially devoted to the Daisy. The botanical interest is this: It is a well-known fact in botany, that all the parts of a plant--root, stem, flowers and their parts, thorns, fruits, and even the seeds, are only different forms of leaves, and are all interchangeable, and the Hen and Chickens Daisy is a good proof of it. Underneath the flowerhead of the Daisy is a green cushion, composed of bracts; in the Hen and Chickens Daisy some of these bracts a.s.sume the form of flowers, and are the chickens. If the plant is neglected, or does not like its soil, the chickens again become bracts.

The only other point in the botany of the Daisy that occurs to me is its geographical range. The old books are not far wrong when they say "it groweth everywhere." It does not, however, grow in the Tropics. In Europe it is everywhere, from Iceland to the extreme south, though not abundant in the south-easterly parts. It is found in North America very sparingly, and not at all in the United States. It is also by no means fastidious in its choice of position--by the river-side or on the mountain-top it seems equally at home, though it somewhat varies according to its situation, but its most chosen habitat seems to be a well-kept lawn. There it luxuriates, and defies the scythe and the mowing machine. It has been a.s.serted that it disappears when the ground is fed by sheep, and again appears when the sheep are removed, but this requires confirmation. Yet it does not lend itself readily to gardening purposes. It is one of those--

"Flowers, worthy of Paradise, which not nice art In beds and curious knots, but Nature's boon Pour'd forth profuse on hill, and dale, and plain, Both where the morning sun first warmly smote The open field, and where the unpierc'd shade Imbrown'd the noontide bowers."

_Paradise Lost_, iv, 240.

Under cultivation it becomes capricious; the sorts degenerate and require much care to keep them true. As to its time of flowering it is commonly considered a spring and summer flower; but I think one of its chief charms is that there is scarcely a day in the whole year in which you might not find a Daisy in flower.

I have now gone through something of the history, poetry, and botany of the Daisy, but there are still some few points which I could not well range under either of these three heads, yet which must not be pa.s.sed over. In painting, the Daisy was a favourite with the early Italian and Flemish painters, its bright star coming in very effectively in their foregrounds. Some of you will recollect that it is largely used in the foreground of Van Eyck's grand picture of the "Adoration of the Lamb,"

now at St. Bavon's, in Ghent. In sculpture it was not so much used, its small size making it unfit for that purpose. Yet you will sometimes see it, both in the stone and wood carvings of our old churches. In heraldry it is not unknown. When Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, was about to marry Margaret of Flanders, he inst.i.tuted an order of Daisies; and in Chifflet's Lilium Francic.u.m (1658) is a plate of his arms, France and Flanders quarterly surrounded by a collar of Daisies. A family named Daisy bear three Daisies on their coat of arms. In an old picture of Chaucer, a Daisy takes the place in the corner usually allotted to the coat of arms in mediaeval paintings. It was a.s.sumed as an heraldic cognizance by St. Louis of France in honour of his wife Margaret; by the good Margaret of Valois, Queen of Navarre; by Margaret of Anjou, the unfortunate wife of our Henry VI.; while our Margaret, Countess of Richmond, mother of our Henry VII., and dear to Oxford and Cambridge as the foundress of the Margaret Professorships, and of Christ College in Cambridge, bore three Daisies on a green turf.

To entomologists the Daisy is interesting as an attractive flower to insects; for "it is visited by nine hymenoptera, thirteen diptera, three coleoptera, and two lepidoptera--namely, the least meadow-brown and the common blue b.u.t.terflies."[377:1]

In medicine, I am afraid, the Daisy has so lost its virtues that it has no place in the modern pharmacopia: but in old days it was not so.

Coghan says "of Deysies, they are used to be given in potions in fractures of the head and deep wounds of the breast. And this experience I have of them, that the juyce of the leaves and rootes of Deysies being put into the nosethrils purgeth the brain; they are good to be used in pottage."[377:2] Gerard says, "the Daisies do mitigate all kinds of paines, especially in the joints, and gout proceeding from a hot or dry humoure, if they be stamped with new b.u.t.ter, unsalted, and applied upon the pained place." Nor was this all. In those days, doctors prescribed according to the so-called "doctrines of signatures," _i.e._, it was supposed that Nature had shown, by special marks, for what special disease each plant was useful; and so in the humble growth of the little low-growing Daisy the doctors read its uses, and here they are. "It is said that the roots thereof being boyled in milk, and given to little puppies, will not suffer them to grow great."--COLE'S _Adam in Eden_.

One more virtue. Miss Pratt says that "an author, writing in 1696, tells us that they who wish to have pleasant dreams of the loved and absent, should put 'Dazy roots under their pillow.'"

On the English language, the Daisy has had little influence, though some have derived "lackadaisy" and "lackadaisical" from the Daisy, but there is, certainly, no connection between the words. Daisy, however, was (and, perhaps, still is) a provincial adjective in the eastern counties.

A writer in "Notes and Queries" (2nd Series, ix. 261) says that Samuel Parkis, in a letter to George Chalmers, dated February 16, 1799, notices the following provincialisms: "Daisy: remarkable, extraordinary excellent, as 'She's a Daisy la.s.s to work,' _i.e._, 'She is a good working girl.' 'I'm a Daisy body for pudding,' _i.e._, 'I eat a great deal of pudding.'"

And I must not leave the Daisy without noticing one special charm, that it is peculiarly the flower of childhood. The Daisy is one of the few flowers of which the child may pick any quant.i.ty without fear of scolding from the surliest gardener. It is to the child the herald of spring, when it can set its little foot on six at once, and it readily lends itself to the delightful manufacture of Daisy chains.