Daisy Meaning: Innocence, Loyal Love, and 'Loves Me, Loves Me Not'

The daisy is the first flower most of us ever used. Before anyone taught us floriography, we were plucking its petals to interrogate it — loves me, loves me not — and threading its stems into crowns. It's the folk flower: common as grass, free to anyone with a lawn, and carrying one of the gentlest meanings in the whole dictionary.

What the daisy symbolizes

• Innocence. The core meaning, everywhere the flower grows. White petals, golden heart, no thorns, no secrets — the daisy is the flower of the uncomplicated.
• New beginnings. Daisies are among the first flowers of spring and among the most common gifts for new babies. In Norse tradition the daisy was sacred to Freya, goddess of love and fertility, which is where the birth association took root.
• Loyal love. The quieter adult meaning. The Victorian dictionaries read the daisy as love that keeps things simple and keeps its word — "I'll never tell."
• Cheerfulness, especially in the gerbera daisy, whose crayon-box colors turned the meaning up several notches.

April babies get the daisy as their birth flower — fittingly, the month of beginnings. (The full calendar is in our birth month flowers guide.)

Day's eye

The name is Old English: dæges ēage — "day's eye" — because the daisy opens with the sun and closes at dusk, shutting its petals over the golden center like an eyelid. Chaucer, who adored the flower, called it "the eye of the day." A flower that goes to sleep every night was never going to symbolize anything sinister.

The botany has one more secret: a daisy isn't one flower. The golden center is a crowd of tiny individual florets, and each white "petal" is itself a complete flower. Every daisy is already a bouquet — which rather suits a bloom about togetherness and simplicity.

Loves me, loves me not

The petal-plucking oracle is older and more international than it looks. The French play it as effeuiller la marguerite — "plucking the daisy" — with a crueler scale: he loves me a little, a lot, passionately, madly, not at all. Victorian girls played it in earnest, and Goethe put it in Faust, where Gretchen plucks a daisy over Faust and lands, fatefully, on he loves me.

One practical note from arithmetic: wild daisies usually carry an odd number of petals, so starting with "loves me" stacks the odds. The game was always rigged toward hope. That, too, is very daisy.

Gerberas, shastas, and the extended family

• Gerbera daisy — the big, saturated florist's daisy. Meaning: cheerfulness, outright. The get-well and congratulations daisy; fifth most popular cut flower in the world.
• Shasta daisy — the garden classic, bred by Luther Burbank from four wild species. Carries the standard meanings with a sturdier stem.
• English daisy — the lawn original, Bellis perennis: "pretty" and "perennial" in one Latin name. The one for crowns and oracles.

When to give daisies

• New babies and new starts — the traditional pick, with Freya's blessing.
• Friendship, uncomplicated — daisies are affection with no fine print, ideal where roses would say too much.
• Get well soon — gerberas, in the loudest colors available.
• An April birthday — their month by right.

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The daisy's whole ethos — simple, cheerful, nothing to decode — is the spirit Bloomette tries to keep. It's a small hand-painted flower studio for iPhone where bouquets come together in five quiet minutes, and every discovered bloom adds its story to your Flower Corner.