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!
