Carol Klein goes crazy for delightful daisies!
They’ll bring colour and excitement to any border that’s looking a little bit tired
Looking out of the bedroom window the other morning, I was struck by the number of members of the daisy family that abound in the garden, bringing colour and excitement to what would otherwise be a very green scene.
There’s a bit of a competition about which plant family is the largest but when it comes to flowering plants the daisy family, Asteraceae, wins hands down with a staggering quarter of a million species. One out of every 10 plants on the planet belongs to this family and you’ll find daisies in every imaginable habitat, from tropical forest to alpine mountainside.
From bog to prairie, hedgerow to seaside, daisies are in evidence. They owe their huge diversity to their ability to adapt to all manner of conditions evolving over millions of years.
The old name for the family was Compositae, and that gives us a clue to one of the common features shared by members of the family. Instead of having single flowers, each ‘flower head’ is composed of many flowers.
Look at a dandelion clock, each head contains hundreds of seeds, each with its individual parachute and each was originally one flower. In members of Asteraceae, which look like the typical ‘daisy’ – the flower little children draw – there are two sorts of florets. Ray florets comprise the outer ring of often brightly coloured ‘petals’, and disc florets form the centre of the flower head. To confuse matters further some have only disc florets – the burdock (or ‘sticky bobs’ as we used to call them) have only disc florets, whereas the dandelion and its ilk have only ray florets.
Daisies are a huge and
‘When it comes to flowering plants, the daisy family wins hands down’
important group of plants. For those who prefer to stick to ‘cultivated’ daisies (this may be a contradiction in terms since the great majority we use in our gardens are wildflowers from some other part of the world), there are plenty to choose from.
For our purposes, those we’re most interested in are daisies from temperate regions like our own. Of course, there are a few exceptions, such as the little Mexican daisy, Erigeron
karvinskianus, which has established itself not only in the south west but increasingly also on walls much further north. It’s a charming plant whose white daisies become deep pink as they age, and though it’ll seed itself into every nook and cranny it can find, it could never become a nuisance.
Another Mexican daisy, the dahlia, has been living happily here for at least 200 years. There are zinnias, calendulas, catananche, echinops, eupatorium, gaillardia, inula, tagetes and osteospermum – the list really is endless!
Many of our best daisies originate further north in the Americas, in the USA and Canada. Many were ‘prairie plants’, although their natural habitat has disappeared.
The Michaelmas daisies belong to this group, Symphyotrichum novae-angliae (formerly Aster novae-angliae, from New England) and
S. novi-belgii are good examples. So many of our mainstay border perennials come from North America: heleniums, with their bronze and yellow door-knob centres surrounded by floppy petals in rich rusts, oranges and yellows, the helianthus, perennial sunflowers – many reaching 2m (6½ft) high, and the rudbeckias, often called black-eyed Susan.
Almost without exception these are robust daisies used to the hurly-burly of life on the prairie, or of competing with grasses in a scrubby setting and therefore ideal to use in a similar context as a crucial part of our beds and borders.