The daisy family
We are now in the month of September, famed for dahlias, Michaelmas daisies and rudbeckias, so I thought we should look at the daisy plant family, which links them all. As a horticultural student, I had to learn about Compositae, the name applied, at that time, to the daisy family. These days botanists prefer to use the name the Asteraceae, but the plants are the same and, boy, there are thousands of them. Many are real stars of our gardens right now.
■ Botanically, the daisy bloom is made up of numerous tiny individual flowers. The relatively large external petals (or ‘rays’) surround a bright centre consisting of scores of tiny flowers all pressed together. This is referred to as a ‘composite flower’.
Daisies in numbers!
32,900…
