The good life
From the dainty cottage charmers of spring to the heat- seeking stalwarts that fill our summer gardens with colour until the dying days of autumn, daisies – even the weedy ones – deserve our admiration, writes Lynda Hallinan.
Lynda Hallinan goes crazy for daisies.
You’d have to be a fairly po-faced sort of person – or someone in dogged pursuit of lawn perfection – not to find daisies appealing. From the sunny-side-up wild dog daisies ( Leucanthemum vulgare) that proliferate in our farm paddocks to prize-winning giant sunflowers and even the lettuce in our salad bowls (yes, Lactuca sativa is botanically classified as a daisy), this vast plant family offers something for everyone.
Known officially as Asteraceae, the daisy clan – sometimes also referred to as the sunflower family – boasts as many as 32,000 species and is recognised as the most populous of all the flowering families.
The clan as a whole gets its name from asters, which in Greek means star and refers to the shape of their starry flowers. The common name daisy, meanwhile, comes from the Old English “daes eag”, which translates to mean “day’s eye” and refers to the habit of Bellis perennis of opening its petals in the morning and closing them again at night.
This habit of getting a good night’s sleep gave rise to the idiom “as fresh as a daisy”, while cemetery residents are said to be literally “pushing up the daisies” from their burial plots.
Although we think of daisies as simple, single flowers, they’re actually composite blooms with a central disc or capitulum of small, densely-packed flowers surrounded by a ring of ray florets with a whorl of involucral bracts at the base to hold the whole thing together. Dissect a dandelion, for example, and it’s easy to identify all the parts of the inflorescence.
Common, carefree and colourful, daisy flowers are universally loved by bees and by small children; ask a kid to draw a flower and they’ll no doubt draw either a big yellow sunflower or a daisy ringed with white petals.
Perhaps that’s because the lawn daisy, Bellis perennis, is the first flower that most of us encounter as children. At primary school, my best friend Jenny and I spent many a lunchtime crafting necklaces and floral crowns from the weedy daisy constellations growing on the school athletics field, using our thumbnails to pierce and link the short, slender stems together.
Primary school is where we also learned the words to Daisy Bell, that Victorian-era ditty penned by British songwriter Harry Dacre in 1892: “Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do. I’m half crazy all for the love of you.” Above, from left to right: Dainty feverfew daisies ( Tanacetum parthenium, also previously known as Chrysanthemum
parthenium or Pyrethrum parthenium) have long been used in herbal medicine to treat fevers and headaches. They also make a delightfully decorative low edge for a cottage border. A perennial that’s easily raised from seed (Kings Seeds). Oxeye or dog daisies ( Leucanthemum vulgare) are such a pretty pastoral weed.
Leucanthemum x superbum ‘Shapcott Ruffles’ is a snazzy, shaggy, shasta daisy with pure white, finely cut petals. From Puriri Lane Nursery in Drury.
As well as being forever associated with stroppy brides-to-be and bicycles built for two, the classic English Bellis perennis daisy symbolised innocence, chastity and purity in the Victorian language of flowers.
Other members of the family had romantic reputations too: asters stood for daintiness, wisdom and devotion, sunflowers for loyalty and adoration, coreopsis for cheerfulness and chrysanthemums for friendship and love (except yellow chrysanthemums, which represented spurned affection).
Daisy was a popular girls' name in the late 1800's, as well as being a nickname for girls named Margaret or Marguerite (geddit?)
While I’d never turn down a bunch of yellow chrysanthemums from my beloved, until I moved to the country I notoriously turned my nose up at all golden daisies other than sunflowers (and indeed all sunshine-yellow flowers other than the classic David Austin rose ‘Graham Thomas’).
Previously, in my small city garden, I could afford to be snobby with my subtropical plant choices, but now that I have a frosty garden on a large scale, I need hardy plants that cover lots of ground without needing to be mollycoddled – and in this respect, daisies are unrivalled. Heleniums, in particular, get going when the tank runs dry and the going gets tough.
My top 10 list of plants for low-fuss, high-impact, summer colour would include achilleas, asters, coreopsis, cosmos, dahlias, echinaceas, heleniums, helianthus (perennial species and annual sunflowers), rudbeckias and zinnias. It’s no coincidence that all happen to be hardworking members of the daisy family – and the majority are yellow!
Yellow is an attention-seeking hue but in late summer, that’s exactly what you need to detract attention from parched lawns and tired vege patches dusted with powdery mildew.
My garden at Foggydale Farm in Hunua falls to bits from now on but the daisies deliver one last hurrah.
When I my open our gates on March 23-24 for my garden’s annual charity weekend and vintage market (entry is by gold coin donation, see lyndahallinan.com for full details), I bet you the most-asked about plant – again – will be the dark yellow daisy mass-planted under my quince trees.
It’s the frost-hardy, drought-tolerant perennial black-eyed susan Rudbeckia fulgida ‘Goldsturm’, and every year I wish I had an entire field of it.
On second thoughts, perhaps I should hanker for a field of Deam’s coneflowers, Rudbeckia fulgida var. deamii. It’s the spitting image of ‘Goldsturm’ except its flowers are a more refined shade of yellow.
When Sue Hill, from Ravenhill Nursery near Whanganui, worked at Coton Manor Garden in the UK, she says celebrity gardener Carol Klein was “always banging on” about it when she visited for tours and talks.
For cheerful annual colour, sunflowers and retro psychedelic painted daisies - the epitome of 1970's glam, are guaranteed to elicit it a smile.
If you find the clear golden flowers of rudbeckias and coreopsis too garish, plant sunset-toned arctotis, dahlias, gazanias and bronze sunflowers for picking.
Sue grows wholesale natives and shrubs for garden centres but also runs a fantastic online mail-order nursery (ravenhillnursery.co.nz) that specialises in her favourite perennials, such as the pretty threadleaf coreopsis ( Coreopsis verticillata, also known as tickseed), in bright gold (‘Zagreb’) and pretty pale lemon (‘Moonbeam’).
Like Sue, I’m a big fan of perennial sunflowers like Helianthus ‘Loddon Gold’, a double-flowered daisy that grows to 1.5m tall with big heads.
“An easy-care plant that adds zing from summer through to autumn,” says Sue, adding that its “bright sunny colouring never fails to lift my mood”. As she writes in her catalogue, “I think ‘Bring me sunshine, bring me joy’ expresses the sentiment this plant gives to perfection.”
‘Loddon Gold’ truly is one of those no-maintenance, colourful plants we all crave. I’ve got a thriving clump on the roadside by our front gate and even though rabbits give it a hard time early in the season, by summer it’s a superstar. About the only thing it can’t cope with is sitting in a mud puddle for extended periods in winter.
Equally magnificent is Rudbeckia nitida ‘Herbstsonne’, which has cut-leaf foliage and large coneflowers up to 2m high. The pointy central cones start green, giving it quite a different look to most rudbeckias. A stunning feature plant for the back of a border, it’s rarely seen in garden centres but Sue offers it by mail-order.
“All of these plants come in handy at the end of the show because they don’t fade and fizzle out. I often say that you get twice as long out of a late-season plant as a spring flowerer.”
As summer gives way to autumn, asters come into their own but as with many daisies, botanists are forever mucking around with their names. The much-loved Michaelmas daisy, Aster novae-angliae (it’s native to New England in America), now goes by the almost unpronounceable name Symphyotrichum novae-angliae. It’s not likely to catch on in common usage, for asters are what they have always been known as to gardeners.
Sue loves the New York aster, Symphyotrichum novi-belgii ‘Lady in Blue’, which she says is great for the front of borders as it doesn’t need
Asters (meaning “star-shaped" in Greek), give the daisy family its name: Asteraceae .
staking so gives height without collapsing out of the front of borders.
A year ago I bought a selection of upright seed-raised asters from Joy Plants in Pukekohe. Terry Hatch has been tinkering about with them, selecting out only the biggest and brightest specimens to propagate from, including new tall white and wine-coloured strains.
Among Terry’s old favourites are Symphyotrichum novae-angliae ‘Harrington’s Pink’, which has large, candy-pink petals with a cherry pink ring around the golden centres, and the vigorous, dark pink, upright ‘Andenken an Alma Pötschke’, which flowers for a solid two months in late summer and looks marvellous when almost everything else in my rose garden has done its dash.
Terry Hatch is also trialling new hybrids of false aster, aka the white doll’s daisy, Boltonia asteroides. If you are a fan of gypsophila, thalictrum and other dainty fillers for floral work, you’ll never regret planting it in your picking garden. I absolutely adore Boltonia asteroides; it’s a perennial with delicate needle-like foliage that’s smothered in a frothy cloud of small white daisies during late summer and early autumn.
“Bees really love asters,” Terry adds, “and so do hoverflies, which is great because they eat up all the aphids.”
So if your garden is overrun with aphids, hold fire using insecticides and plant daisies (plus other insectfriendly plants like phacelia and buckwheat) and hoverflies will arrive en-masse to clean up the problem for you. Their teeny larvae can wolf down as many as 60 aphids a day!
Aster flowers provide heli-pads for all sorts of predatory and pollinating insects, from tiny parasitic wasps to rotund bumblebees, allowing them to safely land and refuel in your garden, as those central golden disks of tiny flowers are filled with nectar and pollen. A long-flowering daisy that’s beautiful and beneficial – what more could anyone want?