Daisy
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Daisy. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
a low, flowering plant allied to the aster. The word is a contraction of day's eye, in allusion to the sun-like flower. The common daisy is found in meadows and pastures throughout Europe. The leaves form a small rosette on the ground. The tiny scapes bear a flower each, though one cultivated variety, known as the "henand-chickens" has a central flower surrounded by a brood of a dozen small ones. On the approach of rain or nightfall the straps of the daisy curl up. It is a flower that "goes to bed with the sun, and with him rises weeping." The daisy is a favorite with the poets. Chaucer writes: To seen this floure agenst the sunne sprede Whan it riseth early by the morrow, That blissful sight softeneth all my sorrow. and again, Of all the floures in the mede, Than love I most these floures white and rede, Soch that men callen daisies in our toun. Milton, ere he lost his sight, rejoiced in Meadows trim with daisies pied. In Scotland, the daisy is called the gowan; in Yorkshire, the bairnwort, or child's flower; in France, la marguerite, i.e. the pearl. In America, the daisy is a garden flower. It has escaped from cultivation in many sections. The name is applied also to the tall flowering plant known more appropriately as the fleabane. A genuine daisy, a hand's breadth high, grows wild in the Rocky Mountain region. The bitterness of the herbage makes the daisy unwelcome in pastures. All kinds of stock avoid it. It spreads rapidly and persistently by means of underground root-stocks, and competes with the grass for possession of the soil. To most farmers it becomes a pest, yet plowman Burns, climbing to his loft after a day's work , wrote: Wee, modest, crimson-tipped flow'r, Thou's met me in an evil hour; For I maun crush amang the stoure Thy slender stem; To spare thee now is past my pow'r Thou bonnie gem.
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
the common name of the wellknown plants and flowers of the genus Bellis, especially B. perennis. The French call the daisy "Marguerite," from the Greek word margarita a pearl. Though daisies are very common in many parts of the world, they are not universally distributed; for instance, the traveler may wander over hundreds of miles in the Indian Empire without seing one solitary daisy.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
The botany here still stands: Collier's genus Bellis is intact, B. perennis is still the English daisy, and the derivation from "day's eye" that Aiton's gives in 1910 is still the accepted etymology, as Chaucer's own "eye of the day" attests. What has moved is naming. The bitter pasture invader Aiton's calls a daisy is the oxeye, long filed under Chrysanthemum leucanthemum and shifted late in the 20th century to Leucanthemum vulgare when that genus was split off; it is now listed as a noxious or invasive weed in a number of US states and in Australia and New Zealand, which is Aiton's farmers' complaint made into law. The garden favourite that most people now buy as a "daisy" is the Shasta daisy, a hybrid raised by Luther Burbank in California and unmentioned in either account.
Written for this edition, 2026.