If you live in a town or city, or your local park's closed, it's easy to feel cut off from nature, even if you don't typically spend much time in it.

But there's always something to see. And the pattern of, say, one daisy can teach you something about 23,600 other flowers. 1/11

The Common Daisy /Bellis perennis/

...is a lovely flower, but it's not really a flower at all - it's a false flower (or pseudanthium, if that means anything to you).

The petals aren't really petals, and it isn't just one flower; it's about a hundred flowers in one.

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Each 'petal' around the flower-head is itself an individual flower, known as a ray flower. They're infertile, without stamens or pistils, which is partly why it's easy to see them as petals. The fertile part is the yellow mass in the centre.

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Each one of those yellow dots is a flower too, known as a disc flower. These have the stamens and pistils (just barely visible as fine threads in the photo), which are the bits that do all the baby flower-making.

(image source: https://images.app.goo.gl/GrxBzFAtvtYUQkUs9 )

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So now, you have a pattern: ray flowers encircling a mass of disc flowers, which belongs to the Sunflower, or (shocker) Daisy family of plants.

The botanical name is Asteraceae (say it: ass-ter-RAY-see-eye), where aster means star-like; the family has around 23,600 members

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source: https://images.app.goo.gl/Z5QB8FdVZKGwnqHr6

That's the second largest plant family (after orchids). So when you see that pattern elsewhere in a flower, if nothing else, you know straightaway it's a sibling of the daisy and sunflower (and, just fyi, the lettuce and the artichoke).

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But the pattern, annoyingly, doesn't always hold, or rather it does, but can be changeable.

Here's another well-known flower where it's not immediately obvious it's part of the same family..

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The humble Dandelion /Taraxacum officinale/

Here, the ray flowers have taken over and completely crowded out the disc flowers. These ray, or strap-like flowers are fertile, unlike those of the daisy.

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These mature into the seed heads (or clocks) we know from childhood, and with a breath of air are carried away to pollinate.

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Did want to talk more about how looking at any old patch of 'weeds' can help you reconnect with nature, if it feels closed off. How, with some study, plants at pavement edges, or in cracks of walls, can lead you half way around the world.

Botanically speaking, anyway.

10/11

But I've banged on a bit now, so I'll maybe talk more about that and share some tips some other time.

I leave you with a bit of William Blake on a similar theme.

/end

Addendum: a thread from yesterday where I talked about some really common plants/trees.

I didn't make it clear in the thread, but you don't have to venture out to woodlands to these. Many of these can be seen on a trip to the shops. https://twitter.com/KieranJGarland/status/1249800933900500992

to *see these.

Oh, for an edit button.