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:
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!
Gorgeous
Thanks, Sheree!
Wonderful !!!
Aren’t they great? and thanks!