Oxeye Daisy Quotes

One of the remarkable things about Life After Life is the way that this formal experimentation is combined with a consistently involving plot. It is as if the writing of B. S. Johnson had been crossed with the better novels of Anthony Trollope. An entire world emerges but shows itself again and again in different lights. It’s an unusual book in many ways: in part a tribute to England and to the resilience of the English character revealed under the stress of wartime; in part a book about love that doesn’t contain a love story but instead celebrates the bond between siblings. It’s a book full of horror vividly described, as in the repeated image of a dress with human arms still inside it, seen in a bombed building. Yet the most memorable passages are those which describe the prewar English countryside before suburbia encroached upon “the flowers that grew in the meadow beyond the copse—flax and larkspur, buttercups, corn poppies, red campion and oxeye daisies.” Above all, it’s a book about the act of reading itself. As you read it, it asks you to think about your expectations of plot and outcome. The reader desires happiness for certain characters, and Atkinson both challenges and rewards that tendency.

At the edge of the lot, wildflowers had taken over, forming a thick border. I stopped to pick a bouquet of gold buttercups and yellow-and-white oxeye daisies. I plucked a sprig of Queen Anne's lace and watched a black swallowtail butterfly land on a branch of goldenrod. Then I stretched and took a deep breath. The air was mellow and sweet.

I lay on the grasses in rolling fog, In yellow hayrattle and fairy flax, By the dusky moorland and blanket bog; The snipe chirps out her plaintive monologue, A skylark warbles while diving her tracks, I lay on the grasses in rolling fog; Sky continues his subtle dialogue, The sun recites hymns to the zodiacs, By the dusky moorland and blanket bog; The peaceful clouds roll by in epilogue Casting shadows of forgotten syntax, I lay on the grasses in rolling fog; The meadow hums in ancient analog, Oxeye daisies keep their secretive pacts By the dusky moorland and blanket bog; I need no other church or synagogue Within my particular parallax, I lay on the grasses in rolling fog By the dusky moorland and blanket bog.

IT HAD NEVER been such a beautiful May. Every day the sky shone a peerless blue, untouched by cloud. Already, the gardens were crammed with lupins, roses, delphiniums, honeysuckle, and lime clouds of lady’s mantle. Insects cricked, hovered, bumbled, and whizzed. Harold passed fields of buttercups, poppies, ox-eye daisies, clover, vetch, and campion. The hedgerows were sweetly scented with bowing heads of elderflower, and wound through with wild clematis, hops, and dog roses. The allotments too were burgeoning. There were rows of lettuce, spinach, chard, beetroot, early new potatoes, and wigwams of peas. The first of the gooseberries hung like hairy green pods.

He noticed that Ursula’s ox-eye daisies, wrapped in damp newspaper, were drooping, almost dead. Nothing could be kept, he thought, everything ran through one’s fingers like sand or water. Or time. Perhaps nothing should be kept.

Another little-known favorite of mine takes some forethought in the early summer. We've all seen ox-eye daisy (Chrysanthemum leucanthemum) in fields and on roadsides; maybe you even grow it in your garden. As long as you can properly identify it, and as long as you can pick some from a safe, pesticide-free area (without secreting it from your neighbor's garden, even if she does grow a ton), snag handfuls of blooms and dry them well before storing them in a clean, dry jar with a tight-fitting lid. When a stuffy nose comes along, make a mug of tea with a heaping teaspoon of dried blooms. In about 30 minutes or less, a stuffed nose will be clear, and it should stay that way effectively for 4 to 6 hours, same as any cold capsule -- without the side effects. This works best with swollen nasal passages or a drippy nose. Drink a cup of the tea up to 4 times a day.