His lovely suggestion of an English spring
recalls no familiar picture to American minds. No more does
Burns's
"Wee, modest crimson-tippit flower."
Shakespeare, Burns, Chaucer, Wordsworth, and all the British
poets who have written familiar lines about the daisy, extolled a
quite different flower from ours - Bellis perennis, the little
pink and white blossom that hugs English turf as if it loved it -
the true day's-eye, for it closes at nightfall and opens with the
dawn.
Now, what is the secret of the large, white daisy's triumphal
conquest of our territory? A naturalized immigrant from Europe
and Asia, how could it so quickly take possession? In the
over-cultivated Old World no weed can have half the chance for
unrestricted colonizing that it has in our vast unoccupied area.
Most of our weeds are naturalized foreigners, not natives. Once
released from the harder conditions of struggle at home (the
seeds being safely smuggled in among the ballast of freight
ships, or hay used in packing), they find life here easy,
pleasant; as if to make up for lost time, they increase a
thousandfold.
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