The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Oops-a-daisy! What one flower got up to
From medieval love allegory to Cold War propaganda, the humble daisy is a witness to history, discovers Kasia Boddy
Does Bellis perennis, Robert Burns’s “wee, modest crimsontipped” daisy, really need an introduction? Its adjectives are sweet, homely, unassuming, humble, meek and plebeian. The botanist Elizabeth Kent thought it “the robin of flowers”; the poet John Clare welcomed it each year as his “old Maytey”. The fact that the daisy grows in so many places – native to western, central and northern Europe, it has naturalised in most temperate regions including the Americas and Australasia – makes it either the most democratic of flowers or a common weed, depending on your point of view.
In the coded Victorian language of flowers, the daisy had nothing to say but “I share your sentiments”. Lewis Carroll satirised the sentimental moralising of this popular game – in his fiction, flowers don’t offer silent signals, they actually speak – but even he kept the familiar class associations of the daisy. When they make an appearance in Alice Through the Looking
Glass, it’s not as Wordsworth’s “starry multitude” but as a noisy crowd. One “shrill little” daisy voice is hard enough to bear, but it’s their bad habit of all speaking at the same time that vexes the languid Tiger-lily (who only joins in “when there’s anybody worth talking to”). Eventually the imperious Alice stoops down and says threateningly: “If you don’t hold your tongues, I’ll pick you!”
The daisy has everyday credentials in a different sense too, for its English name derives from the Old English daegesege or day’s eye – a reference to the fact that, as the 19th-century essayist Leigh Hunt noticed, it closes its “pinky lashes” at night and opens them again in the morning.
In the courtly marguerite tradition of French medieval poetry, however, where daisies and women share virtues, the emphasis is less on light levels than on when it might be appropriate to be matey. “That she opens and inclines towards the sun means that there is no pride in her, and that she is humble and courteously welcoming,” declared Guillaume de Machaut. “Every time I gather her with my hand and can look at her at my will and lift her to my mouth, to my eye, and kiss, touch, smell, and feel, and gently enjoy her beauty and her sweetness, then I wish for nothing more.” But equally marvellous is the beloved flower’s ability to close up her petals “so tight that nothing can enter in there” and “that her golden centre should not be ravished or stolen away”.
While Machaut’s allegorical intention is not hard to discern, in talking of treasure – and marguerite means pearl – he has inadvertently touched on botanical matters. In that context, however, the issue is not too much ravishment but too little. Since the right pollinators aren’t about during the night, daisies close up to prevent their precious nectar from evaporating.
In 1900, as a way of marking the new century, Richard Kearton made a predawn visit to a field near London to illustrate the daisy’s circadian rhythms with more than poetry. Today considered one of the founders of natural history photography (his brother Cherry being the other), Kearton took two pictures, one before the sun had risen, and one immediately afterwards. When the images – Daisies Asleep and Daisies Awake – were projected on to a screen, the audience,
“men and women who had lived in the country all their lives”, responded with astonishment.
This, Kearton said, proved the value of photography for everyone, for it was clear that rural as well as urban folk missed many of “the interesting changes that are constantly going on around them”. But the pleasure we get from Kearton’s photographs is more than simply documentary. His narrowly focused overhead shots of tightly packed flowers also bring to mind contemporary Voysey wallpaper designs or the two-dimensional panels painted by Gustave Caillebotte in the 1890s as an attempt to create a Parterre de Marguerites in his dining room.
Nature and culture, confused yet again. And that’s before the added complication of artificial light enters into the equation. In one of his earliest poems, D H Lawrence imagines daisies which have “waken all mistaken” in the yellow electric light of Piccadilly Circus, and compares them to the pale-faced prostitutes who have unhappily emerged at the same time. For Lawrence, it’s never a good thing to interfere in natural rhythms, floral or human.
Although, in outline, the daisy’s shape seems to be the simplest – it’s what small children usually draw when they want to depict a flower – the structure is highly complex. The bright yellow central disk might, from a distance, look like a single flower, but it’s made up of scores of tightly packed, tubular florets, each of which contains tiny pistils and stamens. The daisy’s original family name Compositae refers to this composite of small florets.
The disk is surrounded not by petals but by another group of tiny flowers, known as ray florets; Rousseau compared them to little white tongues. (While daisies and sunflowers have both disk and ray florets, some other members of the family have one or the other; the dandelion has only ray florets, the thistle only disks.) The structure of Bellis perennis is particularly appealing to flies, bees and butterflies, for the rays provide an excellent landing site from which to access the nectar and pollen on the disk. In the early spring, when other food is scarce, many insects rely for sustenance on the lawn daisies whose spreading rhizomes the bowling green or tennis court groundsman tries so hard to eradicate.
The plant provided treasure for people, too. Apothecaries used both the flowers and leaves to create poultices for wounds and, especially, bruises (the daisy was sometimes known as bone or bruise wort). The shape and habit of the flower also meant that it was included among other ocular flowers, like eyebright (Euphrasia officinalis), to treat diseases of the eye. This was according to the doctrine of signatures employed by 16th and 17th-century herbalists such as Giambattista della Porta and William Coles, who believed
Dog breeders who wanted puppies to stay small used to put daisies in their milk
that God gave herbs “particular Signatures, whereby a man may read… the use of them”.
The daisy’s low-growing habit was another signature for those who believed that contact with the flower stunted growth. Nursing mothers were instructed to keep their babies from touching daisies, while dog breeders who wanted to keep their puppies small were told to put the flowers in their milk.
The daisy’s size is one reason why it is so often associated with children: the flower’s Yorkshire name is bairn wort. A more plausible explanation lies in the flower’s abundance and ubiquity which makes it readily available for childhood games. Adults often look back nostalgically to the years when they roamed the daisied fields (or the local park) and played those games; sometimes, though, they adapt them to more mature purposes. Thinking first of the flower’s white rays, we might remember how we used to pull them off one by one to find out if someone fancied us. Since the number of rays on a daisy varies, there is an element of suspense in the game although some claim that we’re more likely to get an odd number and therefore a “yes”.
More sophisticated versions ask when, “this year, next year, sometime, never”; who, “rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief ” or “soldier brave, sailor blue, dashing airman”; and just how much, “un peu, beaucoup, tendrement, passionément, à la folie”.
Another game relies on the daisy’s soft, pliant stem. Making a daisy chain requires a ready supply of flowers and a sharpish fingernail with which to create a small slit in the middle of the stem. Another stem can then be pushed through the slit, and on and on, until the chain is long enough to make a necklace, bracelet or crown. In Flora Britannica, Richard Mabey records several variations of this game, including Welsh caterpillars, where the head of a long-stemmed daisy is pushed through the yellow heads of several others, and the “Irish” or “Australia”’ daisy where the head is threaded through its own stalk so that it looks as if it’s growing upside down.
Today, the phrase daisy chain is used to describe the workings of both circular and linear sequences in all kinds of contexts, including strings of airfields; commodity trading schemes; sexual activities involving three or more people; as well as all kinds of systems connecting electrical and electronic wiring, devices and data. And, carrying on a tradition that began more than a hundred years ago, every May a small group of Vassar College sophomores put on white dresses and carry an elaborate 150ft rope of daisies and laurel to the graduation ceremony.
The novelist Mary McCarthy attended Vassar in the early Thirties but was never “on the Daisy Chain”; her classmates rather too gleefully recalled that, with her “crooked” smile, “limp” hair, and “very Irish face”, she “wasn’t Daisy Chain material”. Not very generous – but McCarthy would get her own back by depicting their friendships, sex lives and careers in her 1963 bestseller The Group.
The novel ended up being much more than an exercise in delicious revenge. If the idea of the Daisy Chain provoked McCarthy into thinking about the intertwined lives of women, it’s surely fitting that The Group itself initiated a long chain of similar stories, eventually inspiring the hit TV shows Sex and the City and Girls.
Another popular daisy game involves pretending the flower heads are a flotilla of boats. What could be more fun than watching them float away? That’s certainly the view of the monster (played by Boris Karloff) in the 1931 film adaptation of Frankenstein. He’s delighted when a little girl called Maria invites him to join her in throwing daisies into a lake. It’s a touching exchange between two innocents until the monster runs out of flowers and, not knowing the difference between flowers and children, throws Maria into the water. Filled with remorse, he runs off into the woods.
In the United States and elsewhere, censors reacted in horror, and the scene was eventually cut just before Frankenstein picks up the girl. But this only made the film more disturbing, for when her lifeless body appears later in the story, audiences were forced to speculate about just what might have happened. The original footage was only restored in the Eighties.
Tony Schwarz might have been thinking of Maria and the monster when he conceived “Daisy Girl”, the notorious advert that helped Lyndon B Johnson defeat Barry Goldwater in the 1964 US presidential election, and changed the rules of political campaigning forever. It was the first commercial that made no attempt to provide information or establish an argument. The aim was clear and simple: to tap into, and direct, the audience’s emotions. And to do so within 60 seconds. Needing to work fast, then, the director had to rely on images that were unambiguous and easily recognisable. A small girl pulling apart a daisy fit the bill perfectly: everyone knew what that meant.
The Cold War Daisy Girl faced a menace even more terrifying than a rampaging monster. The film begins as she counts each ray that she pulls off the flower, endearingly stumbling over her numbers – 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 6, 6, 8, 9, 10. We then segue to an all too efficient mission-control countdown. We close in on her (daisy) eye, and from its darkness emerges footage of a nuclear mushroom cloud – the fate, it was implied, that Americans faced if they voted for the impulsive and bellicose Goldwater. But he’s never named. Instead we hear Johnson’s voice intoning: “These are the stakes, to make a world in which all of God’s children can live, or to go into the dark. We must either love each other, or we must die”, the last line an echo of W H Auden’s “September 1, 1939”.
Only then are we reminded, by another voice, what this has all been for: “Vote for President Johnson on November 3.”
Although the advert was officially screened only once, its shocking images meant that it was repeatedly aired on national news broadcasts. Johnson won the election with 61 per cent of the popular vote, and Monique Corzilius, the three-year old plucking the daisy, went on to make commercials for SpaghettiOs and Kool Pops.
Daisy Girl is now an icon in the history of political advertising, and in recent years it has been repurposed by both Republicans (Rob Astorino and Mike Huckabee) and Democrats (Hillary Clinton). In 2016 Clinton brought back Corzilius to testify that the nuclear threat posed by the unpredictable and belligerent Donald Trump was as bad as it had ever been. “This was me in 1964,” Corzilius says, as we watch her three-year-old self pick at the flower. “The fear of nuclear war that we had as children, I never thought our children would ever have to deal with that again. And to see that coming forward in this election is really scary.”
The notorious ‘Daisy Girl’ advert helped Lyndon B Johnson win the 1964 election
Daisy girls are often in danger, but more often from deflowering than from a monster or a bomb. This, of course, applies to all girls whose lives are imagined as flowers and thus follow an inexorable narrative from darling bud to reproductive bloom to extinction. But there are flowers and flowers. The trope was so well established by the late 18th century that when Robert Burns’s plough runs over the “slender stem” of the “wee” flower, his mind immediately turns to the comparable fate of the “artless maid” – can her bloom escape “Stern Ruin’s ploughshare”?
By the early 20th century, that fate was often illustrated, and relished, rather than simply implied. The most explicit visual representation I’ve found is a rather lurid painting by Gari Melchers called Red Hussar. Thinking only of the dashing soldier who is caressing her breast, a naked woman knocks over a vase of daisies; while the water runs off the table, the fallen flowers – taller ox-eye daisies (Leucanthemum vulgare)
– are still working hard to protect her modesty.
But the daisy’s reputation for girlish innocence was under threat too, especially when confronted with the Jazz Age
cynicism of The Great Gatsby (1925). Jay Gatsby’s object of adoration seems to be a real daisy, a “bright-eyed” vision in a white dress, the product of an impeccable “white girlhood”. But after we’ve finished F Scott Fitzgerald’s story of sex, lies and deception, we realise that Daisy Buchanan’s name is wholly ironic: she is not natural but “artificial”; not fresh but “sophisticated”; not humble and low-growing, but keen to sit “safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor”. Like all flowers, she speaks, but her voice is “full of money”.
But once the stereotype had been overturned, what then? In the Fifties and Sixties, a new kind of daisy girl emerged: one that used the flower to reinvent childish innocence for a new era. The daisy became the bloom of choice for filmmakers keen to present the naturalness of the new sexual freedom, that is, of an infantilised sexuality. Pull My Daisy (1959), written by Jack Kerouac, and produced by G-String Enterprises, makes this apparent in its opening song, The Crazy
Daisy. Taken from a poem written by Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady, the lines are given a woman’s perspective in Anita Ellis’s airy cocktail-jazzy rendition: “pull my daisy/ tip my cup/ all my doors are open”.
The message was clear: the daisy was no longer trembling in fear of deflowerment but cheerfully in charge of its own sexual fate. We find another version of this in the amateur striptease performed by daisyclad child-woman Brigitte Bardot in Roger Vadim’s 1956 comedy En Effeuillant la Marguerite (Plucking the Daisy), and yet another in Sedmikrasky (Daisies), by Czech New Wave director
Věra Chytilová: the free-flowing story of Marie I and Marie II, two anarchistic girls who emerge from a field of daisies and take it from there.
Over the course of little more than a hundred years, the cute wee robin of flowers had had quite a makeover. No longer modest or humble, it was now a sex kitten.
Extracted from Kasia Boddy’s Blooming Flowers, published by Yale at £14.99 on April 28