Bouquet of Daisies...

This is my favorite bouquet to make.. I make it all the time. It costs $4.. $5 if you include the little tin bucket which are available tons of places. I am taking this bouquet to a friend of mine who has just accomplished a major accomplishment! Hooray! Long story.. but anyway she deserves some flowers!

Daisies are my favorite.. Well OK.. it's difficult to choose a favorite flower because I like most of them quite a lot.. but daisies are definitely one of my favorites. And, these daisies with the green centers are my favorite daisies.. I don't know why I always paint them with yellow centers. Hmm.

Daisies are the happiest flower to me. In the language of flowers, they mean innocence and they are common flower and so they kind of remind me of childhood... a playful and innocent happiness. Lovely.

Chaucer called the daisy the "eye of the day". Daisies are perennials and sometimes they volunteer for beauty duty. My brother-in-law once told me that a weed is actually defined as anything that is not planted intentionally. I don't feel that way. I think volunteers are often a miracle of nature.

My favorite tree in our whole neighborhood was planted by heaven. It's lovely in the summer with green leaves and in the autumn when the leaves tumble down. It's beautiful covered with snow and looks magical when frost and fog crystals freeze to it. It is such an amazing shape that even right now "mud time" according to Robert Frost the branches reaching for the sun make me hear the sounds of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring in my head. I know the more violent parts of that ballet are supposed to be something about pagan Russia and oppression and all that.. but when I listen to it... it sounds like the violence of a winter storm.. It sounds like ice and wind and then it sounds like the joy of flowers and blooming and little grass shoots coming through the dirt.

I suppose daisies are common because we see them all the time, but they are a miracle to me. My mom likes to say that beauty has its own value. It truly does. It's hopeful. It has the spark of faith in it.

Flower in the crannied wall,

I pluck you out of the crannies,

I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,

Little flower-- but if I could understand

What you are, root and all, all in all,

I should know what God and man is.

Tennyson