Daisy
(Bellis Perennis)
The daisies which cover our lawns in summer come from a very big family indeed. More than 32,000 species belong to the family Asteraceae, which also includes coneflowers (echinacea), chrysanthemums, dahlias, cosmos, tarragon and even lettuce.
Here in Killearn, gardeners could hardly fail to notice that Bellis perennis is a very common species indeed.
Fascinating fact:
Daisies close their petals at night, open them in the morning, then follow the sun around the sky all day. Botanists call this heliotropism.
Bellis perennis lives in western, central and northern Europe and is tough enough to thrive in places such as the Faroe islands. It generally blooms in early to midsummer but it can have a very long flowering season, reaching into winter if it is mild. Each flower head is made up of 15 to 30 tiny individual flowers, and it can be propagated either by seed or by division after flowering. To distinguish it from the great many other kinds of daisy in the world, it is sometimes known as the common daisy, lawn daisy or English daisy.
Did you know
People named Margaret are sometimes called Daisy because of the French name for the Oxeye daisy – “Marguerite”.