_Achillea Millefolium_
_Flower-heads_--Grayish-white, rarely pinkish, in a hard, close,
flat-topped, compound cluster. Ray florets 4 to 6, pistillate, fertile;
disk florets yellow, afterward brown, perfect, fertile. _Stem:_ Erect,
from horizontal root-stalk, 1 to 2 ft. high, leafy, sometimes hairy.
_Leaves:_ Very finely dissected (_Millefolium_ = thousand leaf),
narrowly oblong in outline.
_Preferred Habitat_--Waste land, dry fields, banks, roadsides.
_Flowering Season_--June-November.
_Distribution_--Naturalized from Europe and Asia throughout North
America.
Everywhere this commonest of common weeds confronts us; the compact,
dusty-looking clusters appearing not by waysides only, around the
world, but in the mythology, folk-lore, medicine, and literature of
many peoples. Chiron, the centaur, who taught its virtues to Achilles
that he might make an ointment to heal his Myrmidons wounded in the
siege of Troy, named the plant for this favorite pupil, giving his own
to the beautiful Blue Cornflower (_Centaurea Cyanus_). As a love-charm;
as an herb-tea brewed by crones to cure divers ailments, from loss of
hair to the ague; as an inducement to nosebleed for the relief of
congestive headache; as an ingredient of an especially intoxicating
beer made by the Swedes, it is mentioned in old books. Nowadays we are
satisfied merely to admire the feathery masses of lace-like foliage
formed by young plants, to whiff the wholesome, nutty, autumnal odor of
its flowers, or to wonder at the marvellous scheme it employs to
overrun the earth.
Dog’s or Foetid Camomile: Mayweed; Pig-sty Daisy; Dillweed;
Dog-fennel
_Anthemis Cotula (Maruta Cotula)_
_Flower-heads_--Like smaller daisies, about 1 in. broad; 10 to 18 white,
notched, neutral ray florets around a convex or conical yellow disk,
whose florets are fertile, containing both stamens and pistil, their
tubular corollas 5-cleft. _Stem:_ Smooth, much branched, 1 to 2 ft.
high, leafy, with unpleasant odor and acrid taste. _Leaves:_ Very finely
dissected into slender segments.
_Preferred Habitat_--Roadsides, dry waste land, sandy fields.
_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!