Delectable daisies for every type of garden

Bright, cheerful and easy to grow, it’s no surprise that daisies are a popular flower – and there’s one to suit every garden. By Lia Leendertz

Ask a child to draw a flower and they will draw you a daisy: a central circular disk surrounded by a ring of petals. Daisies appear to be the simplest form of flower, but in fact they are a lot more complicated than they appear. The central disk is composed of hundreds of tiny flowers, all packed closely together, and these are surrounded by a ring of “ray florets”, elongated petals each with a tiny flower at its base. All of these flowers make them a boon for wildlife, with pollinators able to sip from a vast number of little wells of nectar.

Their name originates from Old English “daeġes ēage”, via Middle English “dayesye”, meaning “day’s eye”, due to the lawn daisy’s habit of opening with the dawn and closing at dusk, which is also behind the saying “fresh as a daisy”, as they open fresh each morning.

In various cultures daisies are associated with childhood, childbirth, motherhood and play. They are given to congratulate new mothers and, when formed into daisy chains, will make the simplest and prettiest flower crowns. And of course you can pull off the petals one by one to find out whether or not your love is requited: “He loves me, he loves me not.”

But it is not just the lawn daisy, Bellis perennis, that takes the name. It is often used to refer to a number of plants with the same arrangement of disks and ray florets, mainly in the family Asteraceae, which itself was named after the starshaped tears shed by the Greek Goddess Astraea, which she wept because there were so few stars in the sky. This encompasses a great variety of plants that suit all sorts of situations in the garden, from cracks in paving, to the late summer border, to hanging baskets.

With their happy, sunny faces and huge value to wildlife right through into late summer, it is always worth finding a spot for a daisy.

Late in the year the colours of the border mostly turn hot, to reds, oranges and yellows, but if you prefer cooler shades then echinacea – another member of the Asteraceae family – comes in shades of pink, purple and white (and a few oranges). The common name refers to the shape of the central disk of florets, which is more domed than in other daisies (knollgardens.co.uk).

BEST FOR MEADOWS Leucanthemum vulgare (Ox-eye daisy, moon daisy) Ox-eye daisy was once a common sight in hay meadows, but now that these are rare you are more likely to see them lighting up roadside verges with their big yellow and white daisy flowers. This is one wild flower that is as at home in the flower border as it is in the meadow. Buy seedlings to plant into a meadow, or to grow into plants for the border (sarahraven.com).

BEST FOR WILDLIFE Echinacea purpurea ‘Magnus’ (Cone flower)