Carol Klein explains why she’s delighted by daisies and answers your questions
They're an adaptable bunch and a hugely successful family, too!
Banks of ox-eye daisies in full flower are one of the most joyful of summer sights. Even on a grey day they create a feeling of happiness, but if the sun shines their exuberant flowers open wide and the grass around them is hardly visible through sheets of gleaming white.
With some councils leaving road verges to their own devices, these flowers have had the opportunity to re-establish. The daisy family, Asteraceae, are an adaptable bunch and a very successful one. They're found in both hemispheres and on every continent, with the exception of Antarctic.
Not only are they widespread but they're also diverse, and they’ve evolved in such a variety of situations that there are daisy flowers to be found at just about every time of the year.
In the garden at Glebe Cottage, the most obvious daisy is one of the tiniest! Does that sound like a contradiction in terms? Erigeron karvinskianus is a pretty little daisy from Mexico that enjoys nothing more than getting its roots into cracks and crevices and cares not whether that’s on horizontal or vertical surfaces.
Apparently in the new stadia that were built for the first World Cup held in Mexico in 1970, its seeds must have been in the sand used to mix the concrete and the steps of the terraces were lined with its pretty flowers!
Most of the early summer
daisies here though, were planted deliberately. Perhaps my favourite among them is Aster frikartii ‘Mönch’. Whereas most of our later summer and autumn daisies have a North American ancestry, its parents are both from this side of the Atlantic. One, A. thomsonii is from the Himalayas, the other is the Italian starwort, A. amellus. It has rough leaves and isn’t subject to the nasty mildew that besets the novi-belgii group of Michaelmas daisies. But its virtues are so much more than that, starting with its deportment. It makes a branching, bushy plant, though the stems are held separately from one another so you can appreciate its shape and see its delightful blue daisies distinctly. The flower heads are beautifully balanced, a neat centre that starts green and becomes brilliant yellow as each of the disc florets, the individual flowers making up the centre, opens and reveals its pollen, encircled by a ring of slender blue petals, the ray florets. It’s a sterile hybrid, which means that though it cannot produce seed, it has no reason to stop flowering. It’s also as hardy as can be and truly perennial.
There are other blue daisies too, though some are tender and best treated as annuals. Felicia amelloides is full of its bright blue flowers from midsummer until October. Lift and cut back plants in October and take cuttings from new growth.
Osteospermum are superb, showy daisies for a sunny spot. Some are hardy, some on the tender side but all are easy to grow from cuttings.
We haven’t got a lawn, but if we did, it would be full of them; making daisy chains is a family tradition. I’m looking forward to introducing our granddaughter to the custom. It would almost be worth having a lawn just to grow daisies!
'We haven’t got a lawn, but if we did, it would be full of them; making daisy chains is a family tradition'