Oxeye daisies

Oxeye daisies have been splashing their gold and white colors from meadows and rural roadsides since May, attracting insect pollinators and random spiders.

To find a hiding place on a flat-lying flower is a challenge for even a small spider. But if it bends two white ray flowers into a canopy and binds them with silk (as in the picture), potential victims may not notice it.

I wonder, too, how many European insects were dispersed across the New World with the ox eye, as it spread from eastern seaports in shipments of grain and fodder that contained its seed.

In 1777, the New York wilderness was probably sown with daisy seed from fodder shipped from Germany for the horses of General Burgoyne’s army, enroute from Canada to defeat on the Hudson.

And as early as 1631, a colonist carried to Massachusetts Bay a packet of oxeye seed purchased from an apothecary in England, where it “groweth in medowes, and in the borders of fields almost everywhere.”

The scientific name chrysanthemum celebrates the plant’s gold center. “Chrysos,” in Greek, equals “gold,” and “anthemon,” means “flower.”

Better yet is our common word “daisy,” derived from Anglo-Saxon tribesmen who esteemed it as the “daeges-eage,” or “day’s eye.”