Daisy Chain

Ask a small child to draw you a flower and you will probably be presented with the classic daisy shape. This may be largely due to its pleasing simplicity but will doubtless also have something to do with the ubiquity of the daisy family, which contains over ten per cent of the world’s flowering plants.

Your young friend may struggle to process the fact that, in the real world, the flowerhead atop the stalk is actually hundreds of tiny flowers or florets. The central boss is made up of tubular structures known as disc florets and what we tend to call petals around the edge are, botanically speaking, ray