Why every daisy is hundreds of flowers

Daisies might just be the first flowers you ever met. But there's something they've been hiding from you all these years: they're not flowers at all, but tiny intricate bouquets. Flowers come in a ridiculous variety of shapes, sizes, and layouts - but underneath this chaos there are three simple, obvious things which all flowers share.

Phew. That makes flowers pretty simple, especially in this lily where each part is very large and obvious. If you start checking out the flowers you come across, in florists, roadsides and gardens, you'll always notice these parts. They'll be strange shapes, confusing sizes and come in all sorts of numbers, but they'll always be there, neatly and reassuringly, because without them sex would be impossible for the plant. Sex is all flowers are for: attracting animals with their petals, shaking pollen (male sex cells) onto them with the pollen makers, and being fertilised with foreign pollen via the pollen grabber. Everything is so simple until you get to daisies. Daisies mess up everything.

Let's check out a couple more flowers just to make completely sure we've got what a flower is:

Here's a wild rose (ancestor of the weird mutant red roses people give each other on Valentine's day, whose sex bits are ironically so obscured by hundreds of petals that they're useless). They grow all over the UK, and you can see it has exactly the same parts as the lily, just as every flower does. You've definitely got it by now, but one last non-daisy:

This one's a geranium - you'll see them growing by the pathside, wherever you live. So this game is really simple: whatever flower you're looking at, wherever in the world you've found it, it will be built out of these three bits. So what the hell's going on with this monstrosity below?

Yup. It's a normal daisy. Where are the pollen bits? Is it broken? Does it just not bother with sex? We can start to get a feeling for whatever witchcraft is at work by taking a closer look:

Something really deviant is going on in this 'flower'. Each of the little yellow blobs on the outskirts has opened up and is sort of reaching out with a mysterious stick-shaped structure. To get a clearer idea of what's going on, let's take a look at a closeup of a big fancy type of daisy. In this fancy species, the mysterious blob structures are larger and more spaced out, showing the sharp-eyed viewer that each blob has one of two different types of column, and each column is enclosed by a round wall of colourful ribbons.

This photo is one of many impossibly beautiful closeups taken by Brian Johnston, whose full portfolio can be seen here

Check it out. As the blobs mature - first the outer rings, then in a mexican wave of blob-opening, the inner rings - they give away their true identity. Each ribbon-coated blob is a single tiny flower. That's right, one daisy is actually hundreds of tiny flowers packed together like heads in a bustling crowd.

But hang on, that still only reveals two of the three flower parts - the colourful ribbons are petals, and the columns must be the pollen makers or grabbers. But shouldn't there be at least one pollen maker and at least one pollen grabber per flower? Not in weird-arse daisies. The flowers which make up its misleading bloom are so small that they can only fit one or the other, which is exactly what we see. The fat, yellow columns to the lower end of the mexican wave above are the pollen makers, some showing their pollen-shedding abilities in what look like unkempt hairdos. The paler, more slender columns closer to the top are the pollen grabbers, with Y-shaped pads for taking their catch from any insect which lands on them. So each daisy still has male and female parts, they're just contained in separate flowers in different parts of the ring.

So we've cleared up where the petals and the sex bits are: They're part of the tiny flowers which make up the yellow central part of a daisy. But we're still left with one intrigue. If the flowers are the central nubs, and they each have five little petals around them, what are the big white things which we normally call the petals?

This is my favourite one of the daisy's cheeky tricks. Having evolved to attract insects who are looking for 'real' flowers, it's had to at least put on a show of having big visible petals. So some of the outermost flowers in the daisy are very odd, and very different to the inconspicuous yellow ones in the centre. Instead of five tiny yellow petals, these outer flowers have only two tiny yellow petals, and have morphed the remaining three into one fused sheet of grotesquely large white petals, far far longer than the flower itself. If you look closely you can see how each white ray is actually three strips fused together.

The whole collection of flowers has more than a passing resemblance to a kid's drawing of the sun. And whoever came up with the technical terms had this in mind: the nondescript yellow flowers in the disk of the sun are called 'disk' flowers, and the weirdly modified outer ones which cast the white strips outwards are the 'ray' flowers.

So there you have it. Don't let daisies fool you again - they're not flowers at all, but a collection of three different types of flower, pasted together hundreds of times on the end of a dainty little stalk. Have a quick glance next time you see one.