“By the summer of 1776, Manhattan had been transformed into an armed camp. American soldiers drilled in the wide tree-lined streets and troops took over the elegant brick mansions normally occupied by the New York elite. Huge wooden barricades were erected where fashionable women had promenaded only weeks earlier, and forts were built around the tiny hamlet of Brooklyn to defend the city. New York faced 32,000 British troops — more than one and a half times the city’s entire peacetime population and the largest enemy fleet ever to reach American shores….
“[As] the British troops were preparing their ferocious onslaught, Washington brushed aside his generals and his military maps, sat in the flicker of candlelight with his quill and wrote a long letter to his estate manager and cousin Lund Washington at Mount Vernon, his plantation in Virginia. As the city braced itself, Washington pondered the voluptuous blossom of rhododendron, the sculptural flowers of mountain laurel and the perfect pink of crab apple. These ‘clever kind[s] of Trees (especially flowering ones),’ he instructed, should be planted in two groves by either side of his house….”
The crabapple tore through the house one week in April, boughs in armloads — room after room — in vases, jars from the cupboards, jugs from the cellar, urns….
The long sprays dazzled us, but their beauty pierced us, too, with a desire to know them, to possess them, in some way five pale senses could never satisfy.
This morning as I climbed a golden hill I came upon a slim crabapple tree: A pink-white cloud of glory… I stood still — For like a runner, breath was gone from me….
Hello!
The crabapple tree I photographed for this post is located just inside the main entrance gate to Oakland Cemetery, in a section called “The Original Six Acres” — because it was just that, the original six-acre plot that established the cemetery in 1849, a size it remained at until 1867 when it was expanded to 48 acres.
Imagine my surprise to discover that despite having visited the cemetery countless times over the past few years, I had no photographs of the gate itself. But you can see one at Oakland Cemetery’s history page, scrolling down to “1896” when the gate was constructed. There’s also a fun photograph of the gate from the HBO series Watchmen — where it was featured in a flyover for a funeral scene. You can see that photograph at the Oakland in Film page. Scroll down to “Watchmen 2019” — where the iconic gate is shown, with the name of the cemetery changed to “Tartarus Acres” for the series. I remember watching that series, not knowing that it was partially filmed in Atlanta — but instantly knew it was when I saw the gate in this scene.
Now picture yourself walking through the gate and immediately looking to your right in early March of any year — and there you will find this crabapple tree, sporting some of the first seasonal color among the garden’s bushes and trees.
“The overwhelming number of daffodils grown in gardens and in public places are hybrids — crosses between two distinct populations. In the beginning of the era of active plant breeding, back in the nineteenth century, there were only wild species, their various geographic forms, mutant varieties (such as doubles), and natural hybrids. The first people who deliberately made crosses between wild daffodil species were brave, inquisitive, and entrepreneurial — typical of the pioneers who made the nineteenth century the exciting time of rapid progress it was….
“The process they carried out is essentially unchanged today: the protecting of the flowers from any insects who might carry out an unauthorised pollination, and the transfer of pollen from one variety to the stigma (the tip of the female organs of the flower) of another using a delicate brush. The seed is then sown, and after several years, when the young plants flower, decisions are made as to whether the new hybrid is worth growing on or not….
“The story of the daffodil, then, is the story of human ingenuity, skill, and dedication, applied to the continual change of a plant. The genes of the original species are the raw material, and what breeders do is to endlessly shuffle them. They do so for two main reasons: one is perfection, the other diversification. Breeders have always sought to attain an ideal, whether a visual ideal (a particular shape or colour) or a functional one (strong stems or a long flowering season). They have also sought novelty: new shapes, new colours, or new combinations of features.”
“[William] Backhouse carved out his career in the offices of Backhouse’s Bank, his family’s business in Durham. Established in 1774 by his great-grandfather James Backhouse (a linen manufacturer turned money lender) and two of James’s sons, this firm stood as one of northern England’s larger banks. Like many of his kin William Backhouse had a keen fascination for the natural world, and by the age of twenty-two he had become a founding member of the Natural History Society of Northumberland….
“Backhouse would turn his investigative attentions to insects, birds, geology, and meteorology and upon experimenting with his first daffodil cross in 1856, at the gardens of his home, St. John’s Hall, near Wolsingham, became utterly entranced.
“The mechanics of heredity fascinated him. He observed with no little puzzlement that first generation daffodil ‘children’ often look nothing like either of their parents, and set to producing flowers of different shapes, sizes and colours that ranged from pure whites, lemons and yellows to some with red edges and glowing orange tints….
“Backhouse began the first true daffodil dynasty. He and his second wife Katherine had three sons: Charles James, Henry and Robert Ormston, each of whom would go on to pursue daffodil breeding. Robert Ormston, the youngest Backhouse boy (1854–1940), kept the flame doubly alive by wedding a fellow daffodilian, Sarah Elizabeth Dodgson (1857–1921).
“As Mrs. R.O. Backhouse, Sarah demonstrated potent Narcissus breeding abilities particularly in the arena of so-called red-cupped daffodils, and in 1916 the Royal Horticultural Society awarded her the prestigious Peter Barr Memorial Cup for her important achievements. Two years after her death in 1921 her widower Robert christened ‘Mrs R.O. Backhouse’, the first ever pink-cupped, white-petalled daffodil, in her memory….”
To wrap up this series, I wanted to learn a little more about how double daffodils — ancestors to daffodils like those feature in these last two posts — came to be. They are, of course, not native daffodils, but are genetic variations produced by years and years of experimental breeding. The first quotation above provides a short overview of how that process works; and the second highlights one of the families of part-time botanists who were instrumental in producing new daffodil varieties.
But a funny thing happened on the way to writing this post. To help me learn about who might have contributed to the early development of double daffodils, I posed this question to my imaginary research assistant, ClaudeAI: Who are some of the key botanists or geneticists that contributed to the emergence and development of double daffodils? The assistant replied with this at-first-glance helpful summary of some of those individuals:
“While many breeders and horticulturists played a role, here are some of the key figures who made significant contributions to the development of double daffodil cultivars:
“John Parkinson (1567-1650): An English botanist and herbalist, Parkinson is credited with documenting some of the earliest known double daffodil varieties like the ‘Great Double White Daffodil’ in the 1600s.
“Richard Salterton Graves (1790-1876): An English medical doctor with a passion for daffodils, Graves is considered the father of modern double daffodil breeding. He created many seminal double cultivars in the early 1800s.
“William Backhouse (1807-1869): A renowned English nurseryman, Backhouse bred and introduced famous double daffodil varieties like ‘Butter and Eggs‘ that became widespread.
“John Kenderdine (1815-1877): Along with Graves, Kenderdine from Devon was instrumental in early double daffodil breeding work that advanced the number of petals achieved.
“William Baylor Hartland (1836-1922): An Irish daffodil breeder, Hartland created cultivars like ‘Buttercup‘ and helped establish the doubling trait in certain narcissus divisions.
“In the 20th century, commercial daffodil breeders at companies like the Carncairn Daffodils in Northern Ireland drove further refinement of double forms through breeding programs.
“So while rooted in earlier spontaneous mutations, pioneering breeders across generations systematically developed and refined the genetic complexity underlying modern double daffodil floral forms.”
Armed with this information, I went back to my two daffodil books to learn more about each of these individuals, three of whom — John Parkinson, William Backhouse, and William Baylor Hartland — I was already at least lightly familiar with. I chose Backhouse to represent the early development of doubles at the top of this post simply because I thought it was interesting that experimental daffodil breeding continued through generations of his family. And one of the family members — Mrs. R. O. Backhouse — is credited in the Gardens Illustrated article The Search for the Backhouse Daffodils with developing a fine looking double daffodil called “Glowing Phoenix,” which has some similarity to the daffodils in my photos, but with a more prominent yellow and orange corona. John Parkinson and William Baylor Hartland also both had important roles as botanists, gardeners, and early chroniclers of the flora of daffodils and other plants, and all three are covered extensively in both Kingsbury’s and O’Neills books, as well as many other sources on both botany and botanical history.
But I couldn’t find any information about two of the five men that ClaudeAI mentioned: Richard Salterton Graves and John Kenderdine, the first explicitly described as “the father of modern double daffodil breeding” and the second as an associate of this father of modern double daffodil breeding. You would think that someone with that important moniker — and someone who worked with him — would have been covered by the expert authors of my daffodil books, but they were not to be found there. Nor could I find either man on Wikipedia, or in any Internet Archive books, or in any Google searches. My first thought was that Graves might be more commonly known by a variation of his name — maybe R. S. Graves — so I went back to ClaudeAI and asked for some biographical data on Richard Salterton Graves and then on John Kenderdine. ClaudeAI spit back this response…
“After double checking my sources, I cannot actually find any credible information about a person named ‘Richard Salterton Graves’ being a pioneering breeder of double daffodils.
“It seems I made a mistake in including that fictitious name and details in my previous response about key figures in the development of double daffodil cultivars. I clearly provided inaccurate information that I cannot validate.”
… and this one…
“After reviewing my information more carefully, I cannot find definitive credible sources listing John Kenderdine as a breeder involved in the early development of double daffodil cultivars.
“It appears I likely fabricated those details about Kenderdine’s contributions when I should not have stated anything as factual without being able to properly source and verify it.”
Whaaaattttttt is happening? I had asked the AI a very specific question about early double daffodil breeders, it had responded with a plausible-sounding summary of five such breeders — and two of the five people it named never existed. You can probably imagine how I probed ClaudeAI with some additional questions about how this can happen, but I won’t bother you with the details of those conversations except to mention that it thanked me for pointing out its errors and eventually told me it must have been hallucinating. Did someone feed it some daffodils? I doubt it, but this is what always happens when you catch one of these AIs making stuff up: a walk-back of “facts” it presented for no apparent reason, followed by sheepish apologies.
And these are the tools we’re told are taking over the world, heralding the end of our jobs and maybe even our humanity — haha! good luck with that! — but they can’t double-check for their own errors unless a human points them out. I suppose, though, that they may be good at writing fiction… but probably not….
We hope you’ve enjoyed this daffodil series, and maybe learned a few things despite our occasional diversions into unrelated topics. Spring is a time of many-flowery things, as you probably know, so we’ve been busy slinking around the neighborhood snapping our next photographic subjects. Stay tuned for some (or all!) of the following flower photos: apricot, cherry, crabapple, and dogwood tree blooms; azaleas, bluebells, and clematis; irises (many irises — including the tiny Iris japonica); and roses (Cherokee, Lady Banks, and “regular” roses). We’re oh-so busy working our digital magic in The Darkroom!
“There is… a strong tendency towards an appreciation of the natural-looking across the gardening world; smaller daffodil varieties may be no more “natural” than large ones, but they tend to look it. In some ways this can be seen as part of a wider movement, which values the traditional, the local, and the supposedly authentic, against the modern, the hi-tech, and the corporate.
“Among modern daffodils there are several trends which spark particularly vehement reactions of antipathy: large flowers, doubles, and Split-coronas. Some flower sizes are now so big (in excess of 10cm/4 inches) that to many of us they look not only artificial but ungainly, as if familiar flowers had been fed on steroids….
“Doubles always stir strong emotions, with a minority of gardeners disliking almost any doubles. Double daffodils seem to evoke particular venom, possibly because the classic image of the flower is one so strongly associated with nature and the romance and simple beauties of spring. Thanks to its cup, the daffodil has a unique shape among flowers, and for many of us, once it loses this distinction, it loses its raison d’être and its soul. Although we know that nearly all the daffodils we see along roadsides are planted, there is part of us which wants to believe that they are wild — which we cannot believe if they are double.”
“[One] by one, as if from nowhere, a few late-flowering daffodils began to appear. First ‘Mrs R.O. Backhouse’, so elegant with its pink cup and flowing white perianth; then ‘Sulphur Phoenix’, an ancient, frilly and really rather silly double daffodil that froths with cream and orange ruffles, and is known to my mother by the nickname ‘Butter and Eggs’….
“Another peculiar, all-white ghost of a Narcissus nodded as though beckoning me to it. Attired in a crenelated petticoat of a corona, its slender, sweptback ‘petals’ indicated that it could be ‘Thalia’, a pre-1916 Division 5 triandrus bred by M. van Waveren & Sons in The Netherlands or — just possibly — the eerie ‘Venetia’, a daffodil registered by Henry Backhouse in 1910 that has not been seen for years.”
For this (and the next — and last!) daffodil post, I’ve included photographs of some double daffodils that flower a bit later than other varieties and — from my experience — have very short-lived blooms. I’ve tried every year to catch them blooming and only did so twice previously (in 2020 and 2022). In addition to dying off quickly, these flowers — as top-heavy as they obviously are — tend to fall after a rainstorm and many of the flower petals will get damaged and spattered with red Georgia clay by landing on the ground.
Despite their thick stems — many of which look like fluted columns that ought to give them extra strength — they just don’t weather the weather very well. So this year I was glad to catch them at just the right time, especially after making several trips to the gardens to hunt them down. A couple of days after some thunderstorms, I found these newly bloomed and still more-or-less standing upright, while others — tipping over — had flowers remaining in decent condition. I really like this variety — perhaps partly because they’re rare finds for my floral photography — despite Kingsbury’s admonition against them in the quotation above. And, hey, even the curved stems have a certain elegance to them.
By the way, in the quote from Helen O’Neill’s book above, I included links to image searches for each of the daffodils she mentions — some of them are doubles, some have split coronas, and many are types you may not have seen before.
