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Tag: narcissus

Daffodils, Mostly White, Definitely Not Imaginary Blue

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From “Narcissus” in Flowers and Their Histories by Alice M. Coats:

“The art, hobby or profession of breeding garden varieties of daffodil is not of recent origin; it had already begun in Jacobean times, and instructions for raising seedlings were given by John Rea in 1665. The majority of early gardeners, however, seem to have been content to import their new varieties from the Continent, for Philip Miller in 1724 complained that ‘in England there are very few persons who have patience to propagate any of these flowers that way, it being commonly five years before they can expect to see the fruits of their labour’. It was not until Dean Herbert of Manchester conducted his experiments in hybridizing, in preparation for his book on the Amaryllidaceae, published in 1837, that interest in daffodil-raising was really aroused in England….

“His work inspired Edward Leeds of Manchester, William Backhouse of Darlington, and finally Peter Barr, to specialize in the flower. Peter Barr was justly called the Daffodil King; for besides founding the firm of Barr and Son, and continuing the development of the strains started by Backhouse and Leeds, he travelled extensively in Spain and southern Europe in search of wild daffodils, and was instrumental in restoring to our gardens many species that had been lost since the time of Parkinson….

“He also wrote a book called Ye Narcissus, and was largely responsible for the organization of the first Daffodil Conference in 1884. He died in 1909, but his work was carried on by George Herbert Engelheart, whose honorary title was Father of the Modern Daffodil. The first Daffodil Show was held at Birmingham in 1893; and the flower has made steady progress ever since. It has now become one of the world’s most popular flowers, and specialists devote to it the attention and care once lavished on the carnation, the tulip and the auricula. In 1903 the Rev. W. Wilks (then Secretary of the R.H.S.) expressed the opinion that no further advance in daffodil-breeding was either possible or desirable; but to us, looking back, the modern daffodil seems only to have been in its infancy at that date. Since then the lovely pink-cupped varieties have made their appearance, led by ‘Mrs. R. O. Backhouse‘ in 1923; and a later achievement was a trumpet daffodil with a white perianth and a scarlet cup exhibited by her son, Mr. W. O. Backhouse, in 1953….

“We may yet see an all-red daffodil, or a white-and-green trumpet, or even a shade approaching blue.”

From “Blue Daffodils” in Blue Daffodils and Other Poems by Bryan Owen:

I saw blue daffodils
swaying in a lilac breeze
one warm afternoon in May;
a lime-green sun shone down
from a pink-striped sky
as below me
dirty black cars crawled
creepily back to their holes
in the ground.

A bee buzzed brightly,
a cat flew overhead
and it was good to be alive.

Hello!

We have arrived at the end of Daffodil Season — which tends to start in February here in the Southeast and wind its way into late March or (if we’re lucky) early April. While I have photos of other flowers (such as snowflakes, tulips, dogwoods, and quinces) in my backlog, I’ll take a couple of trips to Oakland’s gardens in the next few days to see if there are any daffodils left. Most likely, early irises — probably white ones — have started to bloom, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they get my attention even if there are a few stray daffodils remaining.

The flowers in this series are a mix of four cultivars: the large white and yellow daffodils are identified as Narcissus × incomparabilis and Narcissus pseudonarcissus; the smaller ones are Narcissus tazetta and Narcissus poeticus. Toward the middle of the galleries, I’ve included four photos showing where the large daffodils were growing, in a shaded section of the gardens where you can listen to them shift in the wind as they bloom, while you rest on a stone memorial bench.

A funny thing happened on the way to writing this blog post. As a summary of early daffodil breeding efforts, I had selected the quotation at the top (from Flowers and Their Histories by Alice M. Coats) to wrap up my daffodil series, and noticed how she mentioned the future possibility of blue daffodils toward the end. Since the book was written in the 1970s, I wondered if progress had been made toward developing daffodil blues, especially since — as is often the case when I analyze colors produced by my camera — I’m very aware that white flowers will appear to have blue tones (something I wrote about here), depending on surrounding colors, the presence of cool sunlight in shadows, and the reflective qualities of the flower I photographed. So I started hunting down the elusive blue daffodils with a simple Google search, thinking that if they did exist, I’d link to their images so you could take a look.

Here’s a screenshot of my interaction with Google on the question of blue daffodils (poke for a larger version):

“Yes, blue daffodils are real” — I am told. Except they aren’t.

Notice the confidence with which Google’s AI has informed me that blue daffodils do indeed exist, while including an image of a painting of blue daffodils for reference. If you try an image search for blue daffodils, you’ll probably see that same painting among the results, along with pictures of blue daffodils which — this should be obvious — aren’t showing a natural blue color, but one added by an image editing program. Note also that toward the end of Google’s response, it mentions Gardens Illustrated, the well-known gardening and horticultural magazine, to which it provides (at the right of the response) a link to this article…

World’s first blue daffodil finally flowers

… published on April 1, 2022.

Does that date seem odd? Or maybe — if you know a minimalist amount of French like I do — you may have noticed that the blue daffodil cultivar’s name — Narcissus ‘Poisson d’Avril’ — appears to have the word “fish” (“poisson”) as part of its name. So a literal translation of that name would be “April Fish Daffodil” while a more accurate, contextual translation would be “April Fool’s Daffodil” since the historical French origins of April Fool’s Day often referenced fish instead of fools. It’s a clever pun on the part of Gardens Illustrated, one that does a nice job of obscuring the joke, and manages to combine gardening, plant breeding, history, and botany in a short but endearing article.

As someone who often can’t resist tunneling down a rabbit hole once I’ve stuck my head in, I decided to learn a little more about how prevalent the misinformation parroted (“hallucinated“) by Google’s AI was around the internet. I’m not going to link to the things I found (spam abounds under the covers) but you can certainly find these and other variations if you want to “do your own research.” And I discovered, among other things:

  • an AI-generated website describing the botanical history of blue daffodils, and which daffodils were used to breed them;
  • another AI-generated website which goes into detail about the chemical process used to create blue daffodils, which, after paragraphs of implausible but scientific-sounding words and phrases, points out at the end that they don’t actually exist;
  • yet another AI-generated website that considered Narcissus ‘Poisson d’Avril’ a real daffodil cultivar, and used a copied page about yellow daffodils from the same site, replacing “yellow” with “blue.”
  • references to their commercial availability for gardeners to purchase blue daffodils for their gardens by the year 2030;
  • websites describing how to grow and propagate them (presumably not until 2031 🙂 ), with links to photographs of flowers that are actually blue irises rather than daffodils;
  • repetition of content from the original April Fool’s Day article from Gardens Illustrated, with the “10 years in the making” updated to 12 years, and repeating references to the “top secret location in Wales” (one of these?) where the flowers were (not) being engineered.
  • impossible images showing their presence among other daffodils in gardens, where their blue colors contrast with the more traditional yellow daffodils; and, finally:
  • actual sellers on some of the world’s most well-known online shopping sites offering “blue daffodil seeds” (daffodil seeds dyed blue?) for sale that will allegedly produce blue daffodils similar to those in the fake photos accompanying the listings.

The last one is especially interesting to me because it demonstrates the commercialization of misinformation. We got there, apparently, from long-standing botanical curiosity around the idea of blue daffodils; to an April Fool’s prank; to the proliferation of the prank as a fact on AI-generated websites that didn’t get the joke; to Google’s AI assuring us that blue daffodils really do exist and it’s just a matter of a few years before they make it into our gardens; to random sellers offering “blue daffodil seeds” for sale from online shops.

Continuing further down the rabbit hole, I decided to ask three other AI tools — ChatGPT, Perplexity, and ClaudeAI — about blue daffodils too. ClaudeAI — the one I use the most — recognized blue daffodils as part of a joke right off the bat, as did Perplexity and ChatGPT. ChatGPT even had a little more fun with the joke, offering to create a photo of imaginary blue daffodils for me, so I’d have one on hand if blue daffodils someday came to be:

Of the four AIs I queried, then, only Google — the most ubiquitous source of information on the internet — seems to have been fooled. Because the idea of “dueling AIs” amuses me, I went further with ClaudeAI: I uploaded Google’s response and asked for an explanation of how this misinformation made its way around the web. Here’s what it told me:

This is such a fascinating digital folklore situation you’ve uncovered! I love that both Google’s search AI and Gemini confidently presented the April Fool’s joke as fact, complete with the future commercial availability prediction.

What you’re witnessing is essentially the birth of a modern gardening myth, spreading through AI systems. The “Poisson d’Avril” blue daffodil has become a perfect case study in how misinformation can cascade through digital ecosystems:

– A reputable gardening magazine (Garden’s Illustrated) publishes an April Fool’s joke
– Various websites and content farms pick it up as fact
– Search engines and AI systems ingest this information without recognizing the context
– The information gets repackaged and disseminated as factual content
– Eventually, opportunists create commercial listings for impossible products

The irony of multiple AI systems missing the “April Fish” joke while confidently explaining the nonexistent genetics is particularly delicious. It demonstrates one of the current limitations of large language models — they can process vast amounts of text but often miss cultural context clues that would be obvious to humans familiar with traditions like April Fool’s Day.

For gardeners and plant enthusiasts, this serves as a good reminder to approach unusual plant claims with healthy skepticism, especially when they involve dramatic color breakthroughs that haven’t been widely celebrated in horticultural circles.

So there you have it! We’ve debugged a myth about the existence of blue daffodils. The only thing that would make this even more fun is if I ordered some of the seeds and they turned out to grow daffodils with blue petals after all!

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

Yellow Daffodil Miniatures

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From “Jonquilla and Jonquil Hybrid Narcissus” in Garden Bulbs in Color by J. Horace McFarland:

“The true Jonquils are natives of [southwestern] Europe, and are also found across the Mediterranean in Algiers.

“Jonquils have narrow, upstanding foliage and long-stemmed, deliciously fragrant flowers which are not only popular in gardens but are forced in large quantities by the florists for use as cut-flowers.

“Of the species, N. Jonquilla, Simplex, single, and N. Jonquilla flore-pleno, with double flowers, have been garden favorites for generations, furnishing with little or no care generous quantities of long-lasting cut-flowers. The trumpet-shaped flowers are rich yellow in color and produced in close clusters.

“The Jonquil hybrids present interesting variations in size and character of both plant and flower, in coloring, and in time of blooming. One of the oldest of these is Buttercup, with flowers of pure buttercup — yellow, distinctly different in color from the modern Chrysolite which usually has only one light golden flower to a stem.”

From “Ballet of Springtime” in Gifts from the Heart: A Poetry Journey by Ruth Scarr Inglis:

Ballet of springtime
performed in cool wooded glen;
costumed green and gold.
My eyes see yellow jonquils
but my heart hears the music.

Hello!

Here we have some very tiny daffodils — all yellow ones, each with an even tinier cup that is either a darker shade of yellow or a soft shade of orange. I’ve seen these many times on my photo walks, but passed them by — mainly because whenever I saw them, I was usually hunting for their larger or double-form relatives, and there were just a few of these little ones sparsely arranged along the edges of a sidewalk.

Maybe it was a question of timing or very favorable weather conditions, or perhaps some of these are new to Oakland Cemetery’s gardens, but — as you can see from the first photos below — they gathered en masse this year, providing a stunning display while showing off how they look in big bunches. Poseurs that they are, they captured the photographer’s interest for about an hour while I took pictures of the gangs from different angles and distances. These are all most likely Narcissus jonquilla — often called jonquils instead of daffodils because they have their own division in daffodil classification.

Those I photographed close-up show one of the common characteristics of this type of daffodil: flowers nodding at a sharp angle to the stem, at an angle more pronounced than you’ll find in other members of the family. Another characteristic that’s more apparent in the photos toward the end — something they have in common with the double daffodil forms like those I photographed previously — is that multiple flowers will emerge from a single stem, which is very helpful when they hang together in large groups and they’re trying to attract pollinators.

I imagine these are handy evolutionary features — since each individual flower is less than an inch in diameter, and single flowers might not capture the attention of busy bees and bugs buzzing by. Notice how, though, when there is a large number of flowers clustered together (as in the first two photos), the varied angles at which individuals drop away from their stems ensure that the blooms don’t overlap very much — so most of every flower is exposed both to the sunlight and to foraging pollinators.

Earlier in the botanical history of daffodils, there was a tendency to use “jonquil” and “daffodil” somewhat interchangeably, a vernacular that still exists today. I hadn’t paid that much attention to the Jonquil division of daffodils until taking these photos, but did notice when searching some older literature how common it was (especially in poetry and narrative prose) to treat them the same. With the emergence of more precise and standardized classification practices in the 18th and 19th centuries, jonquils got their own scientific honoraria — but you have to admit the word “jonquil” does sound quite artistic and literary, and makes a nice name for a color.

If you’d like to learn more about the differences between jonquils and daffodils (all of which are in the Narcissus genus, here’s a good overview and some excellent background information:

Is There Really a Difference Between Jonquils and Daffodils? 

Thanks for taking a look!

White Double Tazetta Daffodils (2 of 2)

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From “Narcissi” in The Lore and Legends of Flowers by Robert L. Crowell, illustrated by Anne Ophelia Dowden:

“As early as 1627, John Parkinson had distinguished nearly eighty different varieties of narcissus, but in later years many of these disappeared, and for some unaccountable reason narcissus culture suffered a decline for the next two hundred and fifty years. But for the great nurseryman Peter Barr, in England, we might now have far fewer varieties, and the early spring blaze of yellow and gold might be dimmer indeed….

“Mr. Barr was a Scot who spoke no foreign language and had such a thick burr that his own grandchildren could hardly understand what he was talking about. But nothing fazed Peter Barr. He was determined to collect the narcissi where they grew wild. Beginning in 1887 he made trips to Portugal, Spain, and France, often traveling on horseback or muleback, though he had never ridden before. He went high up in the Pyrenees, and at seven thousand feet found Parkinson’s Narcissus moschatus, which had disappeared from England by 1629….

“Looking, looking, digging, digging, he went deep down into mountain valleys, and on one occasion, at least, he slept outdoors under a rock ledge. Barr could not talk with the people he met, so wherever he went he showed large pictures of the flowers he was looking for. This worked, for he tells of finding six thousand bulbs here, seven thousand bulbs there, and one big haul of nearly twelve thousand.”

From “This Morning” in Hurrah! Selected Poems 1970-1980 by Irving Stettner:

This morning I explode
in/on a gold sunbeam mote,

dancedance on a white daffodil
cloud….

Hello!

This is the second of two posts with photos of a double form of Tazetta daffodils. The first post is White Double Tazetta Daffodils (1 of 2), where I describe how I approached the reflected colors among these pearly white flowers during post-processing in Adobe Lightroom.

With this post, we come to the end of the double daffodils for 2025, unless I find more — which sometimes happens!

John Parkinson, mentioned in the quotation above, is well-known as a discoverer and breeder of double daffodil varieties. While alternate daffodil forms were undoubtedly known before him, his book Paradisi in Sole Paradisus Terrestris (1629) documented hundreds of daffodils, doubles among them. If you’re feeling literarily adventurous, click this link to the book and search for “double white” or “double yellow” to read what he wrote about different kinds, and also see sketches of some of them. As a historical amusable, the book title “Paradisi in Sole Paradisus Terrestris” is a Latin phrase that translates to “The Earthly Paradise of Park-in-Sun” — which Parkinson chose to make a pun on his own name.

Thanks for taking a look!

White Double Tazetta Daffodils (1 of 2)

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From “Narcissi” in The Lore and Legends of Flowers by Robert L. Crowell, illustrated by Anne Ophelia Dowden:

“The narcissus has led a kind of double life. It has been both praised by poets and regarded as sinister in the annals of mythology and in the minds of men. In fact, the bulbs are poisonous; mice and moles eschew them, and as a consequence their lovely, persistent flowers multiply in our gardens year after year.

“Until recently people actually believed that the heavy fragrance of narcissus would put you into a coma if you breathed it too long and too deeply. Indeed, according to Pliny the Elder, a Roman naturalist, the very name is derived from the Greek word narké, meaning torpor, from which we get our word narcotic.

“Probably the narcissus that Homer wrote about in his ‘Hymn to Demeter’ was the kind with paper-white bunched blossoms now called Narcissus tazetta or ‘little cup,’ whose homeland was doubtless Greece or western Asia. This same narcissus has been found entwined in the funeral wreath discovered on Egyptian mummies of the eighteenth dynasty (around 1570 B.C.), but, alas, we have no other clues from ancient Egypt about its age and origin….”

From Basho’s Haiku: Selected Poems by Matsuo Basho, translated by David Landis Barnhill:

narcissus —
     and the white paper screen,
          reflecting each other

its color
     whiter than the peach:
          narcissus bloom

Hello!

The flowers I photographed for this post (and the next one) are a double form of Tazetta daffodils. A distinguishing characteristic of Tazettas (which are classified in their own daffodil division) is that each stem will produce more than one flower, creating a cluster of blooms high above ground level that look like a small bouquet. The closely packed, slightly overlapping, arrangement of blooms at the top of a stem (which you can see before they open in one of the photos below) creates an “umbrella effect” called an umbel, a common shape among plants that can organize their flowers this way. In this Tazetta variant, we can also see how its ancestral orange cup has been replaced with fluffy orange and white petals at the center, and that the single row of petals around the cup area has been engineered into layers.

Working on the photographs for these two posts was a fascinating experience. They were all taken in the same location — a section of Oakland Cemetery’s gardens encompassing a 20-foot by 5-foot rectangle, set about three feet above the sidewalk (an especially convenient placement for photographers). As you can see from the first photos, the Tazettas are densely packed: each plant produces plenty of dark blue-green leaves and that, along with the umbrella-like group of blooms on each stem, contributes even more to a sense of density.

I took all the photographs at about the same time on an overcast day with consistent filtered sunlight, so lighting conditions remained about the same until I was done. And yet, as you look through the photographs, notice how the white flowers reflect the colors of their surroundings differently. Some of the flowers appear cool white (or very light blue), and others appear warmer (with yellow and green tones). Scroll to the bottom of the galleries and take a look at the pairs I placed together to demonstrate the difference: the two photos on top show cooler colors, while those on the bottom show warmer colors. Now roll back through the rest of the photos, and it should be more obvious that when the dominant colors in the background are blue-gray (like the stone monument in the first three images) or blue-green (from the leaves surrounding the blooms), the flowers will show off cool colors. By contrast, when there’s more yellow-green in the background, then the flowers reflect that, and the photos feature warmer colors.

Theoretically, this is related to how the camera determines white balance, and it’s also true that in Lightroom, it’s possible to shift the warm or cool tones and create nearly identical whites among the flower blossoms. On my first pass through the photos, that’s what I did — but then noticed that I was creating unnatural background colors because white balance adjustments change the tones of the entire image. There are ways around that, of course, but I wanted to understand what was happening rather than just assume I should continue changing white balance settings to make them all look about the same.

Our eyes tend to discount the slight variations in color we see when looking at flowers like this in real life: we see them as white and probably don’t notice the other colors. But the camera records everything, including the tonal variations, as it “sees” how the white flowers are reflecting the colors around them. And the individual flower petals among these daffodils have a very smooth texture, which acts a bit like a mirror and reflects surrounding colors back into the camera. I compared the white petals in these flowers to some photos of white irises I took last year (see Cool White Irises) — and saw the difference: the white irises, whose petals have much more texture and are like a matte finish, don’t reflect or mirror nearby colors in the same way that these daffodils do. Instead, they scatter the light — which means that they’ll look more white to the camera in similar lighting conditions, whereas the glossy petals of the daffodils will mirror various colors. Imagine, for example, placing a white marble near objects of different colors, and consider how the marble’s smooth surface will reflect these colors differently than, say, placing a white piece of paper near the same objects.

For these white double daffodils, the smooth, reflective texture may be an evolutionary adaptation. Like other daffodils, the white doubles tend to bloom early in the season — here in the Southeast, from as early as February through the end of March — and one of their life goals is to attract pollinators that are less plentiful than they will be toward late spring and early summer. Reflecting different colors may be their way of getting attention from those that emerge this time of year, like the wee wasps, moths, and tiny flies that I saw flitting among the flowers. There’s probably some speculation here on my part — though we do know the flowers didn’t evolve this way so that I’d take their pictures and wonder about their colors in the spring of 2025. Evolutionary adaptations of color and texture among flower petals are known to take place in conjunction with the availability of pollinators at different times of the year, as well as to take advantage of pollinators’ capabilities. If you’d like to read more about that, here are three articles covering variations on the subject, all that explain how flowers evolve petal characteristics to help them make new friends along the way:

How a Bee Sees

Understanding How Petal Surfaces Impact Pollinator Behaviour

The Role of Petal Cell Shape and Pigmentation in Pollination Success

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

Double Daffodils in Yellow and Green, White and Orange

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From “Narcissus” in Complete Guide to Gardening and Landscaping by Time-Life Books:

“Daffodils are among the best known of spring-flowering bulbs, and although there are only about 70 species in the genus, there are hundreds of hybrids with varying flower forms….

“Members of the amaryllis family, daffodils arise from bulbs and generally have flat, narrow leaves. The flowers are usually nodding and may be white, yellow or bicolored. They are borne alone or several per stem. The bloom consists of a corona, or crown, which is cup- or trumpet-shaped, stands in the center, and may be long and tubular or short and ringlike. The corona is surrounded by six petallike segments that are referred to collectively as the perianth….

“Double Daffodils do not look like typical daffodils; there is usually no defined corona but instead a cluster of petaloids at the center, and there may be more than one bloom per stem. Plants range from 14 to 18 inches tall, and blooms are from 1 to 3 inches across. ‘Acropolis‘ grows 18 inches tall, usually blooms late in the season, and is white with red and white petaloids. ‘Cheerfulness‘ bears clusters of double white flowers that are fragrant. ‘Tahiti‘ grows 16 inches tall and usually blooms late in the season; it is yellow with red petaloids. ‘White Marvel‘ has pure white, double blooms on 14-inch plants. ‘Pencrebar‘ is a miniature that grows to 10 inches and has 2-inch, all-yellow flowers.”

From “Spellbinder” in An Indian Summer: 100 Recent Poems by Sacheverell Sitwell:

And as if from islands further west,
     deeper into the mists,
Not sea-green daffodils,
     but a green-yellow I had not known before,
Except in primroses,
     and then only in shadow near to the yews;
A green-yellow like starlight all morning through….

But I have noticed that in a day or two
     the petals of this daffodil become white-pointed,
That their flanges where they join the tube
     and was never sign of needle or thread,
Are white-stained,
     that the trumpet has its bell-mouth whitened too,
As if from sleeping in starlight
     that gives pallor and engenders dreams

So,
     folded in its own greenness,
This cluster,
     this isle of daffodils,
Dreams,
     and soon dies away

Hello!

Here we have photos of three double daffodil variants from Oakland Cemetery’s gardens, that I took during the same photoshoot as the white doubles I posted previously (see White Double Daffodils (1 of 2) and White Double Daffodils (2 of 2)).

Unlike most of the daffodils I’ve encountered this spring that usually appear in large batches (see, for example, Rise of the Yellow-Yellow Daffodils (1 of 2)), these doubles appear to be rather solitary figures, with just a few friends or fans hanging around nearby. Doubles are less common than more “traditional” daffodils (it seems), and their genetics may simply dictate that they’re less likely to propagate wildly on their own, as their more promiscuous relatives tend to do. I don’t think I found more than a dozen individual stems of these three varieties, despite scouring the gardens for more and returning for a second hunting expedition. But while I didn’t find more that looked like these, I did come across yet another set of double white daffodils, similar to the Paperwhites I previously posted yet with a different flower structure and more orange color where the trumpets would have been in their ancestors. I’m still working on those photos and will post them up in a few days.

Those toward the center of the galleries below — with white petals and yellow-orange centers — are nearer in design to daffodils you might find anywhere with white petals and orange trumpets. But take a closer look and you can imagine how botanical engineering might have helped an orange trumpet evolve into overlapping petals with both colors of the flower reflected in the new structure. While the chemical and botanical work involved in creating these changes is beyond my knowledge or ability to explain well, it’s probable that variants like these started as a mutation — the appearance, perhaps, of a daffodil with malformed petals or a multicolored trumpet — which a horticulturalist could then foster by selective breeding. I learned from my research assistant that producing a successful variant like this — and producing one that can continue to be propagated — may take five years or more. And the evolutionary process does indeed start with the appearance of a natural mutation:

Mutations are the original source of what we now cultivate as double daffodils, and this process is a perfect example of how human observation and selective breeding can transform plant characteristics.

In nature, genetic mutations occur spontaneously and randomly. These mutations can cause various changes in plant structures, including: additional petal formation; transformation of reproductive organs into petal-like structures; and alterations in color or flower shape.

For double daffodils, these mutations typically involve a genetic change that causes: (1) stamens to transform into petals; (2) the corona (trumpet) to develop additional petal-like structures; or (3) an increase in the number of flower parts.

Early horticulturists like Peter Barr would meticulously examine large populations of daffodils, looking for these rare spontaneous mutations. When they found a plant with an unusual flower structure — like one with extra, more complex petals — they would carefully isolate that specific plant, propagate it through bulb division, and selectively breed it with other plants showing similar characteristics.

Think of it like a botanical treasure hunt. Most daffodils would look “normal,” but occasionally, a single plant would emerge with a dramatically different flower structure. These rare mutations became the foundation for entire new varieties of daffodils. The process is similar to how we’ve developed many cultivated plants — through patient observation of natural variations and deliberate selection. Double daffodils aren’t created in a laboratory, but emerge from careful observation of nature’s own genetic experiments.

Similarly, those with yellow and green petals are genetic variations of light green daffodils, with selective breeding and genetic modifications undertaken to enhance the (relatively rare among flowers) green colors along with gradually replacing the trumpets with a series of flower petals.

As you can see from the photos, the first batch of yellow and green doubles open in rather strange formations and present distinct bands of color that almost look like stripes; whereas those toward the end of this post have more orange with splashes of green. They, too, have a distinctive appearance as they open with a large number of piled flower petals, looking a bit like a shredded pom-pom — and, to say the truth — I first thought I was looking at a dead flower until I handled one of them and realized that they were as fully alive as they could be.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!