National Geographic Magazine/Volume 31/Number 6/Our State Flowers/The Daisy

Our State Flowers

The Daisy (Chrysanthemum cucanthemum L.)

North Carolina

COMMON or OX-EYE DAISY
Chrysanthemum cucanthemum L.

So popular is the white ox-eye daisy in North Carolina that neither a legislature nor the school children had to express formally the State's choice. The unanimous tribute of a “common consent” award was paid it by the people of the Tar Heel State; and if the whole catalogue of Nature's blossoming children had been ransacked there could not have been found a hardier flower, a more persistent warrior in behalf of its right to exist, or a better loved or worse hated plant, than the ox-eye daisy. Flowering from May to November, it has adjusted its economy to the necessities of its perpetuation in a way admirable to the student of flower resources and baffling to the good farmer who so heartily dislikes to have his field dressed in the full regalia of poor farming.

To the daisy a home in the woods is like an East Side tenement to one who has lived on Fifth avenue. It can never content itself in the shade and the solitude of the forest. The meadow, the pasture, the hay field, the roadside—these are places where it likes to grow; and if it is to grow there it must be well prepared to fight a battle with the farmer. It must be able to set some seed before haying time, else how could it continue its hold in the hay field? Then, too, it must vary its period of blooming, for what farmer who prides himself on well-kept pastures would permit daisies to crowd out his clover if they could be overcome in a single mowing?

Prolific beyond words is this enterprising blossom. It multiplies by wholesale and covers the green turf of April with a flowery snow in June. Ten thousand thousand city folk go out and gather and admire, but ten thousand thousand farmer folk, knowing that it means poor quality and less quantity in hay and pasture, cannot understand the urban enthusiasm for a blossom that lowers production and increases the cost of living.

But with all its “weedy rôle” in the eyes of the farmer, there is beauty in the field daisy and as much sentiment. What maiden has not on its “petals” told her fortune with the formula, “He loves me, he loves me not,” or has failed to find a blossom that would declare to her that her Prince Charming's heart was at her feet?

But whether it be with the eyes of the farmer that you see the daisy, beholding only its persistent invasion of his domains, or whether with the eye of the beauty lover who is called by admiration and not to battle, or whether with the eye of the sentimental who love it for the fortunes it has told, the daisy is by all awarded the honor of being an alien that has no hyphen in its disposition. It is an immigrant, unlike its closest relative, the black-eyed susan; but it has all the enterprise, all the spirit of winning its way in the world, all the Yankee resourcefulness of a flower to the manner born. It long ago found Europe too crowded for comfort and discovered that it could come to America as a stowaway. Over here it traveled on the wind, in wagons, by river steamboats, on railroad trains, any way that offered it the chance to find a new field in which to lay the foundations of a new colony.

The daisy's prosperity is due no less to the form of its bloom than to the tactics it employs in fighting for its position in the field. The white “petals” are not petals at all; they are sterile florets, gaily bedecked in white, waving a welcome to the passing bees and butterflies, whom they invite to the feast which the yellow florets have prepared for them. Like all other progressive flowers, the daisy has designed ways to insure itself the boon of cross-fertilization. The two arms of the pistil are kept tightly closed until the pollen is gone; then they open up and become sticky, so that the bee which comes their way from another blossom must leave with them some of the grains of pollen it has gathered elsewhere.

Source: —, ed. (June 1917), “Our State Flowers: The Floral Emblems Chosen by the Commonwealths”, The National Geographic Magazine 31(6): 497–498. (Illustration from page 512.)