I have always had a sweet tooth. And, outside of the berry season, I’ve often found it hard to satisfy my sweet tooth as a forager. Plants, of course, are constantly manufacturing sugar through photosynthesis, but most of them quickly burn those sugars for energy or convert them to starch and fiber. There is precious little sweetness available in the world of wild plants. This makes the sweet flavor of the ox-eye daisy one of the most welcome greens on my spring menu.
The ox-eye daisy’s proper scientific name is Leucanthemum vulgare but has been called Chrysanthemum leucanthemum for so long that you’ll likely find it under this moniker in most references. No matter what you call it, you’ll probably have no problem finding it. This native of Europe has spread to every corner of our continent, sprouting up wherever soils are poor. Look for daisies in fields, along sunny roadsides, and if your lawn is as scraggly as mine, right in your own backyard.
For the first year of a daisy’s life, it will persist as a dense rosette of long, narrow, smooth, dark green leaves, deeply and irregularly lobed. In the next year, and in favorable years after that, the daisy will send up one to several long stalks that will grow a few feet high and sport a one- to two-inch flowerhead. This familiar flowerhead consists of a ring of narrow white rays around a yellow button with a slight depression in the middle. They can bloom any time from April into September, but most often in late June or July.
All aboveground parts of the plant are edible, and unlike most greens, they remain so throughout the growing season. The leaves will get tougher as the season progresses, but not bitter like most other greens. The best time to gather is the spring when the leaves are at their most tender and the flower buds have just begun to form atop the growing stem.
The leaves are good raw and have a hint of sweetness without being saccharine. I don’t know if this sweetness is truly a sugar or if it is merely a chemical illusion caused by compounds within the plant that stimulate the same taste buds that sugars do, but in the first weeks of spring when I’m gathering daisy greens, l don’t really care.
Daisy greens can be boiled or steamed, but I don’t know why one would. It only dampens their flavor. However, the flowers make a delicate tea, dried or fresh. But the highest use of the ox-eye daisy is as a strangely sweet green. Add it to sandwiches, wraps, tacos, or salads.
In Margaret Atwood’s poem, “Blackberries,” she remarks, “That’s good times: one little sweetness / after another, then quickly gone.” That is certainly true of berries. Daisy leaves may not be as sweet as ripe blackberries, but theirs is a sweetness that persists, that can be found right where you left it for months on end, and that satisfies a sweet tooth even in spring, when berries are just a distant dream.