Yellow Daffodils with Red and Orange Trumpets (1 of 2)

From “Yellow and Orange Daffodils” in The Spring Garden by Michael Jefferson-Brown:

“‘Red’ in daffodil terminology means orange or deep orange….

“The colour is derived from the same pigment as the yellow, the more concentrated the pigment the richer the shade. It has been one of the major concerns of breeders from the early years of the century to produce richer orange colouring. A most important success fifty years ago was ‘Fortune.’ This early blooming kind is still an important commercial cut flower. It was a big jump ahead when introduced. Its pale tangerine orange has now long been surpassed, but its earliness still makes it important. Almost as early is the newer and richer ‘Armada‘ with broad sails as petals and with a bold crown of glowing orange. For earliness ‘Sacajawea,’ a ‘Fortune’ seedling, is perhaps the most promising.

“Many of the most attractive yellow and orange flowers failed as garden plants because the orange burnt or faded in the sun, but now very few kinds offered for sale have this defect. In fact the reverse happens with many new kinds. The blooms open gold and a not very exciting orange. ‘Ceylon‘ is an example, but as each day passes the orange of the crown grows in strength and brilliance till the flower is mature. Now we grow ‘Ceylon’ progeny and such early kinds as ‘Straight Flush‘, and deep coloured ‘Falstaff‘ and Vulcan.'”

From “The Months: March” in The Poetical Works of Robert Bridges by Robert Bridges:

Now carol the birds at dawn, and some new lay
Announceth a homecome voyager every day.
Beneath the tufted sallows the streamlet thrills
With the leaping trout and the gleam of the daffodils.

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Hello!

This is the first of two posts featuring photos of early March daffodils that all have something in common: their flower petals are yellow, and the trumpets (also known as coronas) are in shades of orange.

Or not orange, but “red” as I have just learned, and you can read about that in the quotation at the top of this post. Botanically speaking, the deep orange that appears in some daffodils is usually referred to as the color red — and the author of The Spring Garden describes how that came about. It’s not entirely clear if all occurrences of orange in daffodil trumpets should be called “red” — but I did wonder if shades of red might actually be present in some of these photos, because they look orange to the eyes (or at least to my eyes).

Using a color picker from ColorSlurp to select colors from the ruffled edge of the trumpet in the first three daffodil photos below yielded some interesting results. Here’s a screenshot of some of the colors ColorSlurp uncovered…

… whose names are as delightful as the range of red colors they describe:

Nevertheless, the red is quite subtle among daffodils with this deep orange color, and only exists at the saturated edges of the trumpets. I may have to take a trip back to see if these daffodils are still in bloom, and if I can find red with my eyes if I push my face close enough to the trumpet. I suppose it’s a bit nerdy to analyze colors in flowers to this level of detail — or so I thought until I realized that the presence of red that is not obvious to the eye means I could have accentuated the color and texture of the trumpet ruffles by adding some additional red color; and that at least one entire book (The Color Dictionary of Garden Flowers) analyzes colors among parts of flowers (including daffodils) with this kind of detail. So there is still much color-fun to be had!

The rest of the trumpets in these photographs read as different shades of yellow or orange but no red. Personally I’ve never seen any daffodils with trumpets that strike the eye or the camera as pure red, but apparently they do exist — as you can see here. Notable, perhaps, is that the distribution of color through selective breeding leads the petals to move closer to white as the trumpet moves closer to red. Absolutely fascinating!

Thanks for taking a look!

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