Calle de Lígula
It takes its name from the ligule, the long, tongue-like part that in daisies and sunflowers looks like a petal, though it is a whole flower.
When someone plucks a daisy with the “loves me, loves me not”, they are not tearing off petals: they are tearing off ligules. The word comes from the Latin ligula, “little tongue”, and names those flat, elongated corollas that ring the centre of flowers in the composite family. Each one is, in fact, a complete flower disguised as a petal. What we see as a single daisy is a tight bunch of dozens of tiny flowers, and those at the rim, the showy ones, are the ligulate flowers.
The term also applies to a part of the grasses: the membrane that shows at the join between the sheath and the blade of the leaf. In both cases it describes the same thing, a thin, extended film that recalls a small tongue.
Calle de Lígula traces a little over two hundred metres in the Hispanoamérica district, within Chamartín. Why the municipal register chose this botanical technicality to name the street is not documented.