Author: Dale

From “Daffodil: Spring’s Messenger” in The Story of Flowers: And How They Changed the Way We Live by Noel Kingsbury:

“At the turn of the nineteenth century William Herbert, a lifelong enthusiastic plant-breeder, made a study of daffodils, showing through experimental breeding that they hybridized naturally. This contributed to his developing a version of the theory of evolution, decades before Charles Darwin. Another country cleric, George Engleheart, later in the century, played a crucial role in the development of the modern daffodil; his ‘Will Scarlett’, with its dramatic orange cup, was quite unlike anything else that had been seen, and led to a whole new vein of breeding. Daffodil-growing took a leap forwards in the late nineteenth century, when two key British gardeners, William Robinson and Gertrude Jekyll, showed how easy it was to plant them in rough grass and watch them come up year after year. This helped to stimulate major commercial development in the century that followed….

“The white, heavily scented N. tazetta has been found in ancient Egyptian tombs and was mentioned by classical writers: Homer, Virgil and Ovid. The Silk Road took it to China, where it has long been used in the Spring Festival. Pockets of it naturalized all along the route.

“The botanical name commemorates the Greek legend of Narcissus, who fell in love with his own reflection; this is also possibly a reference to the plant’s supposed (although not well documented) narcotic properties. The scent of some species is indeed so strong that people can be overcome by headaches. The range of species is wide, and includes a number of flower shapes, although all have the distinctive trumpet-like corona, which early twenty-first-century research indicates is unique to Narcissus.”

From “Spring in the South” by Davie M. Herndon in Our World’s Most Beloved Poems, edited by John Campbell:

Crocus blooming at the mailbox,
Yards brightened up with yellow bells,
White spirea and snowy bridal wreath —
That Spring is here it’s easy to tell.

White narcissus and snowdrops small,
Hosts of golden daffodils,
Hyacinths in their waxen hues
All the air their perfume fills.

Tulip trees burst in lilac bloom
While in many hues azaleas dress;
And all the vari-colored bulbs
Through the warm earth gently press.

Camellias nestle on dark green stems —
Pink, white, rose-all three of these;
Wisteria of lavendar and deep purple shade
Drooping gracefully from tall pine trees.

Lawns all abloom wherever you look —
Blossoming dogwoods grace every way,
Heavily laden as with myriad snowflakes —
Hasn’t God made a beautiful display?

Hello!

This is the second of two posts with photos of white double Narcissus tazetta daffodils that I took at Oakland Cemetery on March 30. The first post is White Double Daffodils (1 of 2).

In this post, we take a closer look at the flower structures — a bee’s eye view! — showing how the plants produce inflorescence that may cluster horizontally or vertically or assemble into tiny bouquets. In some cases — when a flower is more isolated from the rest of the gang — it may develop a single bloom atop a sturdy stem or arc gracefully toward the light if the bloom is large and heavy. And as I explained in the previous post, you can also see how each one contains the yellow/orange rippled remnants of what would have been a recognizable corona in a daffodil that had not evolved into a double form.

I selected the poem at the top of the post because of its visual intensity and the way it quite accurately represents the sequential timeline of flowers blooming in the southeast — from the late winter appearance of crocus and spirea, through the early and middle spring appearance of the remaining plants the poet describes. Of course I also noticed that I’ve photographed all but two of the plants included in the poem — mainly at Oakland, but some in my own yard — and posted them here over the past few years. I added links to those tagged posts throughout the poem, if you’d like to explore more of my photography and writing in that somewhat random way.

Thanks for taking a look!

From “Daffodil Definitions” in Daffodil: The Remarkable Story of the World’s Most Popular Spring Flower by Noel Kingsbury:

“The genus Narcissus is one of some sixty in the family Amaryllidaceae, which also includes snowdrops, clivia, and of course Amaryllis. What sets Narcissus apart is the cup or corona….

“The standard pattern for flowers is for them to be made up of four whorls of tissue: sepals (which often form the protective bud), petals, stamens (carrying male pollen-bearing organs), and carpels (protecting the female organ)…. Debate among botanists has raged since the middle of the nineteenth century about whether the corona is derived from the stamens or the perianth segments; similar structures can be seen in other members of the amaryllis family, although it is thought that they arose independently. Now, it appears as if the question has been solved — the daffodil cup is a structure that has evolved independently of either perianth segments or stamens and is unique to the daffodil. What evolutionary advantage it serves remains open to question — possibly it helps directs pollinating insects or protects the stamens from rain.

“There are some seventy species of Narcissus, although some botanists might reduce this to fifty, and others increase to a hundred. As with many plant genera, there are a few species spread over a large area and a ‘centre of diversity,’ where a small area includes a much larger number of localised species. For the daffodil, that centre of diversity is the mountains of the Iberian peninsula (i.e., Spain and Portugal) and the mountains just across the water in the Maghreb (i.e., Morocco and Algeria). Only one species, N. pseudonarcissus, has a really wide distribution in western Europe; N. poeticus (the familiar pheasant’s eye) and the white N. serotinus are found across the regions immediately north of the Mediterranean, while the heavily fragrant white N. tazetta is found further eastwards around the Mediterranean into Iran.”

From “White Narcissus” in Sunlight and Shadows by Mabel Clare Thomas:

Winds across my garden,
Damp and chill,
Bring a breath of Springtime
To my window sill
From the ivory chalices,
Filled with gold,
Of my first narcissus
Braving the cold.

Other flowers sleeping
In their beds,
Miss the fragile beauty
Above their heads
Where my white narcissus,
Harbinger of Spring,
Dances with the breezes
While the robins sing.

Hello!

This is the first of two posts with photos of a double form of the well-known daffodil Narcissus tazetta that I took at Oakland Cemetery on March 30. Each photo is of one or more flowers integrated into the memorial display shown below, one that represents a very typical and complex Victorian garden arrangement with a raised platform, large and richly surfaced stone walls, access steps, and varied plant populations providing visual interest with contrasting colors and textures.

This location is just a few steps beyond that of the Lady Banks’ Rose (Rosa banksiae var. lutea) I wrote about previously (see Discovering (and Rediscovering) Lady Banks’ Rose (3 of 4)), and — as you can see here — the Duncan memorial and some of the double Narcissus tazetta flowers are visible from a distance, toward the left side of this image from the earlier post.

This entire section of Oakland includes some of its oldest and most elaborate displays, and any single wider-angle photo necessarily includes elements from more than one memorial plot. The weathered gazebo you can see in the first image — which looks like it’s within the Duncan memorial — is actually part of another family section, shown here, where it is included as a representation of living activity among the headstones, memorial urns, and intricate mausoleum that I’ll write more about later — when I introduce photos of the tiny yellow daffodils providing abundant spring color to this scene.

I included the excerpt from Noel Kingsbury’s Daffodil: The Remarkable Story of the World’s Most Popular Spring Flower because its description of the parts of a flower and the distinctive corona (or cup or trumpet) of many daffodils can help us understand the unique characteristics of a double daffodil. As you can see from the galleries below, these daffodils don’t have coronas. They possess, instead, a genetic variation where the corona has mutated into a layer or layers of flower petals at the center of each bloom, surrounded by several additional rows of white petals. The yellow-orange color you see at the centers of these flowers would have been the corona, were it not for the mutation that caused the plant to essentially reconstruct that corona into petals instead.

This means — as the excerpt also implies — that double daffodils don’t possess the reproductive structures that are present in daffodils with coronas, so even if they attracted pollinator attention, they wouldn’t reproduce by pollination or seed. There is nothing, as it turns out, for the bugs and bees to do — so it’s quite convenient for the double daffodils that they’ve evolved to reproduce by bulb division. This garden space likely contains descendants of original white double daffodils planted decades ago, with succeeding generations enabled by human caretakers digging up and replanting regenerated daffodil bulbs to maintain the landscaping characteristics of this historical design.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!