"Doctor, lawyer, merchant, priest,
Rich man, poor man, beggar-man—"
The last petal was reached as my little friend came to "beggar-man."
"Oh, dear," she said, with a comical look of make-believe distress on her pretty face. "A beggar-man for a husband! It's too dreadful for anything! Naughty daisy! I don't believe you are a good fortune-teller."
She was right. The daisy is not a good fortune-teller. But it is a nice flower, or rather group of flowers, to study. The whole yellow centre is a crowded mass of flowers, and the white petals along the edge are not petals at all, but rays.
Squeeze a daisy between your thumb and finger. Let the rays drop off, but keep one of the tiny florets, as they are called, and place it under a reading-glass or, better still, a pocket microscope. You cannot spend two or three dollars better than for a pocket-microscope, which will make a small seed look as large as a pea. In our daisy floret we shall find all the parts which the larger flowers have. The calyx is low down, clinging to a single hard seed. Such a seed is called an achenium (plural, achenia). The corolla is a tube with five points cut in the top. There are five stamens, joined, and making a ring by their anthers. The pistil is in the centre, where it belongs, with stigmas, and the style cut in two at the top. The flowers grow on a smooth white receptacle. There are two more things to notice about flowers belonging to this great Composite family: one, that each floret has a long, narrow bract standing beside it; the other, that the calyx-cup is crowned with stiff points, or coarse teeth, or bristles, or feathery-looking things. These are called the pappus. In the daisy there is no true pappus, but you have seen it in thistledown and in the dandelion-seed. The pappus serves for little wings for the flower, by which the wind blows the seed about.
Perhaps you like yellow daisies better than the too common white ones. Their seed was brought to us with clover-seed from the West, and now the yellow daisy or cone-flower is a tiresome weed to farmers about New Jersey, and soon will be over all New England. The florets are dark brown, and grow on a pointed receptacle. It is certainly a handsome thing, but it is a weed all the same. It differs from the white daisy in one particular. The rays of the white daisy have each a pistil like the florets, while the rays of the cone-flower are neutral—that is, have no pistil.
The marnta, or mayweed, is a small daisy growing on sandy roads. Its leaves are prettily cut, and smell like tansy leaves. The handsome asters which keep goldenrods company in autumn, marigolds, thorough worts, and hosts of others belong to the daisy family.
The dandelion has been called "the bright eye of spring." Did you ever curl its hollow stem or blow off its seeds? Blow three times, and you will have as many children as there are seeds left standing, so says this bit of flower-lore. The dandelion has no rays around the edge, but all the florets alike have rays. So the corollas, instead of being five-pointed tubes, are all spread out flat like the rays of the daisy. There are not so many flowers of this kind, but perhaps you know the wild-lettuce, the fall dandelion, the hawkweed, and the chicory. The last is a pretty blue flower. Blue flowers are rather rare. Red, yellow, and pink are commoner.
One of the hawkweeds has handsome leaves, all clustered at the root, light purple underneath, veined with darker purple. If you find such a rosette of leaves, with a tall slim stem bearing a few tassel-shaped yellow blossoms, you will have one of my favorites. Somebody has given it a bad name—rattlesnake-weed. It is not a weed, and only in its purple coloring may there be some suggestion of a snake-skin.
You will see now how the Composites are divided into two classes. The first is tubular, in which, like the daisy, ray-flowers grow only around the margin; the second, ligulate, in which, like the dandelion, all the corollas are alike, spreading out and flat.