"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.
The unpleasant odor given forth by this bushy little plant repels bees and other highly organized insects; not so flies, which, far from objecting to a fetid smell, are rather attracted by it. They visit the camomile in such numbers as to be the chief fertilizers. As the development of bloom proceeds toward the center, the disk becomes conical, to present the newly opened florets, where a fly alighting on it must receive pollen, to be transferred as he crawls and flies to another head. After fertilization the white rays droop. 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.
Not so common a plant here, but almost as widespread as the preceding species, is the similar, but not fetid, CORN or FIELD CAMOMILE (A. arvensis), a pest to European farmers. Both are closely related to the garden FEVERFEW, FEATHERFEW, OR PELLITORY (Chrysanthemum Parthenium), which escapes from cultivation whenever it can into waste fields and roadsides.
COMMON DAISY; WHITE-WEED; WHITE OR OX-EYE DAISY; LOVE-ME, LOVE-ME-NOT
(Chrysanthemum Leucanthemum) Thistle family
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, to 3 ft. high. Leaves: Mostly oblong in outline, coarsely toothed and divided. Preferred Habitat - Meadows, pastures, roadsides, wasteland. 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."