Daisy Day

What the day is

Daisy Day is observed on January 28. No origin for the observance is documented, and the record carries no description, so the plant itself is the subject.

Origin and background

A daisy is not a flower. It is a dense colony of them. What looks like a yellow center is a tightly packed disc of many small complete flowers, each with its own reproductive parts, and each white petal around the edge is itself a separate flower with one enlarged strap-shaped petal. A single daisy head can contain hundreds of individual flowers working as one advertisement.

This arrangement is the defining feature of the daisy family, one of the largest plant families on earth, which includes sunflowers, dandelions, lettuce, artichokes and chrysanthemums. It is a highly successful design: a pollinator landing once walks across dozens of flowers, which is far more efficient than visiting them separately, and the plant gets the visual impact of a large bloom at the cost of many tiny ones.

The name records older observation. Daisy comes from the Old English for day's eye, because the common lawn daisy closes its petals at dusk and reopens in the morning. This is a genuine daily movement driven by light and internal timing, not a poetic conceit.

The chain of daisies made by slitting stems is probably the most widely transmitted piece of unwritten craft in the English-speaking world, passed entirely between children.

How to take part

• Look at a daisy center closely, ideally with a magnifier, and count what is actually there.
• Watch one close at dusk, which is where the name comes from.
• Make a daisy chain, and teach the stem-splitting technique to somebody who missed it.
• Leave part of a lawn unmown, which is where daisies and their pollinators live.
• Notice how many supermarket vegetables belong to the same family.