Adorable daisy is the pick of the bunch
PInnInG a poppy to my lapel two weeks ago, I thought of the flower’s association with fallen youth on the muddy battlefields of the Great War, memorialised in John McCrae’s poem: ‘In Flanders fields the poppies blow / Between the crosses, row on row.’
‘Flowers are always there at the critical moments of life,’ says Fiona Stafford, a professor of Romantic literature at Oxford.
‘As gifts to celebrate a birth or anniversary, as bouquets to adorn a bride, as wreaths to accompany the deceased to the grave and as memorials to comfort those who mourn. Leaves and petals order us.’
A florist’s daughter, she reminds us that, although we buy big, showy bouquets, it’s the humblest flowers that move us most.
Her chapter on daisies is a delight. Did you know they take their name from ‘day’s eye’ — the sun? And, although gardeners battle to keep them from their smooth, green grass, Stafford says they’ve been around longer than lawns. For Geoffrey Chaucer, the daisy was filled with ‘vertu and of alle honour’, always ‘fayr and fresh of hewe’.
After Wordsworth’s brother drowned at sea, the poet best known for his love of ‘golden daffodils’ consoled himself with daisies spreading their tiny, cheerful petals for ‘the morning ray’, then sinking beneath the dews of dusk.
When Alfred, Lord Tennyson found a daisy pressed in a book, it recalled the painful memory of picking it for his wife on a trip to Lake Como, when the couple were in mourning for the death of their first baby. ‘It told of England then to me / And now it tells of Italy.’
While Tennyson was pressing daisies, Queen Victoria was send-
ing little posies of primroses from the Isle of Wight to her prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli. When he died, in 1881, the Queen sent a circlet of the lemony blooms with a handwritten card saying: ‘His Favourite Flowers.’
Primroses once had a regular place on British tables: leaves were served in salads and sedative teas were brewed with petals, which probably looked better than they tasted.
I prefer a refreshing glass of elderflower cordial, which has become a popular alternative to white wine. ‘At the height of the flowering period,’ sighs Stafford, elder trees ‘look as if a parachute regiment has just touched down’. She advises dipping the sprays in batter and frying them into frothy fritters.
But do remember to ask the tree first: according to Scandinavian folklore, the fierce female spirit of the elder is capable of screaming from the fireplace where her wood is burning.
English legend features equally scary fairies. Once, only the bravest souls would walk through a sea of bluebells, for fear of summoning their malevolent spirits, and the sound of bluebells ‘ringing’ was believed to be a portent of death.
We still use lavender in our laundry — its name probably derives from the Italian lavanda (washing) and we know the Romans used it to treat bites and stomach complaints.
When you next wear a paper poppy, you may want to apply a splash of lavender oil to remember the World War I soldiers whose burns were treated with it. Let’s hope its soporific scent helped the wounded find a little temporary peace in sleep.