The daisy’s for simplicity and unaffected air.
~ Robert Burns
Daisies can be found almost anywhere, growing in gravel along the roadside as well as in carefully tended gardens. Yet, regardless of where they find themselves, they are consistently unassumingly pretty flowers with a simple design: Circles of yellow surrounded by numerous petals of white. Throughout the day, daisies follow the sun in the sky, turning their faces slowly from east to west.
As a child I often picked bouquets of daisies but found it difficult to find any that weren’t a magnet for tiny insects. They are a favorite with bees and beetles.
I also used daisies to decorate mud pies and made daisy chains to wear around my neck. Who has not plucked the petals from a daisy repeating, ‘he loves me, he loves me not?’ Daisies and childhood seem to go together. They are a symbol of innocence and loyal love.
Their Latin name Bellis Perennis means perennial beauty. A perennial is usually a flower that lives for more than two years. The name daisy originates with Day’s eye, as they are open from dawn to dusk.
The daisy is a favorite of my friend Rhonda who is 28 today. Like the daisy, she has retained her sweetness and simple country girl manner throughout the years. Here’s a spiral of 28 daisies to mark the occasion. In this day and age, staying sweet despite our years is no easy feat and an accomplishment well worth celebrating.
Child of the Year! that round dost run
Thy course, bold lover of the sun,
And cheerful when the day’s begun
As lark or leveret,
Thy long-lost praise thou shalt regain;
Nor be less dear to future men
Than in old time; -thou not in vain
Art Nature’s favourite.
~ William Wordsworth, To the Daisy
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I love daisies too – what a sweet spiral for your friend’s birthday.
Remember their appearance in the film “You’ve Got Mail”?
JoAnn, they are among my favorites too. I’d never made a spiral of flowers before. Had the black flies not been so bad, I probably would have tried a few more designs too.
PJ, I do remember daisies in that movie. They were so much in sync with shopgirl’s personality.
Ahhh, what a beautiful birthday card from nature! I too love daisies, and they were my gran’s favourites too – she always had a bush or two growing in her tiny garden at the old age home. Whenever I visited her, it was my task to nip off the dead ones, which seemed to give the new flowers a renewed enthusiasm to open up too!
They are so hardy and resilient, that they manage to flourish even in the sandy soil of Namibia, and they’re always so generous with their flowers. Despite their abundance, I didn’t like picking them, though, because they would wilt and droop and curl up so quickly.
The Namaqualand and the Northern Cape are famous across the world for the colourful daisies that appear miraculously all over the veld at spring time every year (depending on the rain).
The veld is completely transformed from its usual dull tones of grey, beige, brown, and dirty green – it looks as though the Great Artist in the Sky has accidentally up-ended all his paint tins!
I’ll see if I can post some photos on my blog of a trip we did in August last year to Clanwilliam.
Hi – me again – here’s the link: http://namibsands.wordpress.com/2009/07/10/the-flowers-of-clanwilliam/
🙂
Oh how thoughtful and lovely to make that daisy-spiral in honor of your friend. Once I had a dream that the daisies were chattering together in some daisy-language. They were so alive and real…have never looked at daisies again without remembering the clarity of that dream and the way the daisies were talking their own language with such innocence and abandon.
[…] After reading Amy-Lynn’s post called “The Simplicity of Daisies” over at her blog, I remembered that we had driven up to Clanwilliam last year in August, and that I had taken a pile […]
The spiral is beautiful! 🙂
My little one’s latest word is “Daisy” – after “Upsy Daisy” from “In the Night Garden”… she spends much of the day pointing at things – pretty much anything, including Mummy and Daddy and the rabbits outside – declaring, “Dayzeee!”
Bless… 🙂 🙂 🙂
When Miss Sadie first came to live with me she had her own song to the tune of Daisy, Daisy . . .
Sadie, Sadie,
What are we gonna do
I’m half crazy
Over the things you chew . . .
It went on, but so did we and now I believe I’ll make her a little spiral of treats to celebrate.
Reggie, thank you for adding the link to your colorful post. Your African daisies are brilliantly hued but daisies nonetheless. Their hardiness makes them so easy to transplant into your garden from the roadside. They produce larger and more numerous blooms with every passing year.
Kathy, I think you need to watch …In the Night Garden. It is the sweetest (and among the strangest) shows for very young children. You may be the only adult on the planet who can probably understand what the Upsy Daisy character is saying. Pepsoid, for one, would appreciate the insights.
Gerry, I’m sure Sadie enjoyed her spiral of treats while being serenaded. I used to make spirals and flower shapes out of Cheerios for my grandson to eat when he was in his high chair. The things we do for pets and babies…
In the Night Garden. The only adult on the plant who can understand what the Upsy Daisy character is saying…ha ha! How funny. Did I tell you that I’ve had training in Voice Dialogue? That probably explains some of the strangeness…
No need to explain the strangeness. I stopped doing that years ago 🙂
“Pepsoid, for one, would appreciate the insights.”
Absolutely! Erm… I think… 😐
(we have just ordered the 4-disc box set for my little one’s birthday! Yes, of course… for *her*… not for Mummy & Daddy… obviously……… 😐 )
Strangeness, where it is beautiful, can not and perhaps *should* not be explained… 🙂