daffodils

Fortunately mice do not seem to eat daffodil bulbs, and my pots of Narcissus that were grown on through the winter in the cold frames for planting out in the garden this spring have escaped unscathed.  I potted up four different varieties, including a hundred bulbs of Narcissus obvallaris, the Tenby daffodil, which are destined for the daffodil lawn, where the display could do with bulking up.  It is the national flower of Wales, native to a small area near Tenby in Dyfed.  They are supposed to be excellent for naturalising, and to cope with semi shade, which should be ideal for my purposes.  The daffodil lawn is shadier than it was twenty years ago, as the hedge and the oak tree at the far end have grown, and is no longer the best home for anything requiring full sun.

I've tried various varieties of daffodil over the years.  I do struggle to keep tabs of all their names, since I recorded which ones I planted, but matching flower to variety is another matter.  Naturalised in grass or scattered through borders they are difficult or impossible to label, not like a tree.  I have planted N. obvallaris before, in 2001 and more in 2009, and I'm pretty sure they're still going strong. N. 'February Gold' has lasted well, and 'Pipit', but I'm not at all sure whether the surviving white flowered bulbs are 'Jenny' or 'Ice Wings'.  I tried buying small quantities of all the varieties I had planted in the daffodil lawn to grow in pots, with the idea of using them as a reference collection to identify the ones growing in the ground, but daffodils don't seem thrilled by the idea of long term pot cultivation.  The really dwarf ones have gradually dwindled and largely died out of the lawn, but whether because the site was too dry for their taste, or became too shady, or because they could not compete with the grass, I'm not sure.  You can see that my attitude to growing daffodils is rather haphazard.

The first of the Narcissus obvallaris were blooming in their pots, and as I leaned down and tipped one flower up towards me for a closer look, it snapped at the neck.  The stems are clearly more rigid than those of hellebores, which you tilt upwards to see inside without thinking.  It seemed a shame to throw the flower away, and I brought it into the house and put it in a small glass vase, shaped like a thistle flower, to look at it properly.

It is butter yellow, and about an inch and a half in diameter.  An outer ring of five petals surrounds an upstanding corona whose petals have fused.  The outer petals are tilted upwards, cupping the corona, which extends above them, and has a delightfully frilled pie crust edge.  When I sniffed it I found a strong, clean smell, sweet but not delicately floral, which made me think of spring and things growing, more of a green smell than a pink, frilly one.

I like yellow flowers, especially small ones dotted around rather than solid sheets of yellow like some of the denser varieties of Forsythia.  I have no truck with those people who see a proclaimed dislike of yellow flowers as a marker of good taste.  However, I am fussy about which combinations of yellow and pink are allowed in the garden.  Pale primrose yellow with purplish hellebores is fine, but bright yellow with almost any shade of pink I can think of does neither any favours.  This makes placing daffodils in the garden tricky, and is one reason why the strong yellows like the Tenby daffodil tend to end up confined to the daffodil lawn.  It's another reason why I start off most new bulb plantings in pots.  Apart from the difficulty of autumn planting into the ground when I can't see what other bulbs are already there,  I like to see the flowers of the bulbs and their new neighbours together before deciding whether to commit.  A year or two back I planted out half a dozen pots of yellow daffodils into the long bed, which looked great for a few days, until the neighbouring Pulsatilla came out.  I couldn't take the combination of reddish pink and yellow, and the daffodils had to come out again.