Hannah Underhill
The daffodil offers many reasons for its enduring popularity with gardeners. Just a few:
You are low on maintenance and high enjoyment. In the unpredictable early days of spring your bright yellow flowers assure me the annual season of rebirth and renewal is about to unleash its beauty upon this earth.
You return year after year no matter how neglectful I might be, asking only that, when planted, you have your pointed side up in a hole deep enough for two bulbs placed on top of each other but holding just one. You aren’t fussy about where you grow because you thrive in full sun or under deciduous trees. Though you’ll try hard to survive in the deep shade of evergreens or the north side of the house, I won’t plant you there because you will never reach your potential flower power. But given adequate sunlight you will likely outlive me and for more than a few generations of my progeny.
I even like it that all of your parts, especially your bulb, contain lycorine, a toxic chemical that could cause considerable tummy troubles. I am not going to eat you and neither are the pesky voles, rabbits, squirrels, chipmunks, and deer that ravish the fleshy roots and tasty leaves of many other plants.
Hybridizers love you so much they can’t stop tampering with your pollen to produce more charming forms of you. I’d be overwhelmed selecting a few among the more than 25,000 registered varieties, so a dozen or two is enough to satisfy my every whim from the big yellow trumpets that grow over 20 inches tall with flowers three inches or more in diameter to diminutive miniatures that pack a lot of charm into tiny flowers displayed on stems averaging 6 to 8 inches tall.
I (and you) can have daffodils blooming in the garden for six or more weeks if I choose some that bloom early, some that flower in mid-season, and some that bloom later. To keep blooms coming abundantly, all I need to do is occasionally feed you with a sprinkling of 5-10-10 fertilizer on the top of the soil when your leaf tips emerge from the ground in early spring.
There is only one maintenance chore you insist upon: I must not cut back your leaves until they have turned yellow or brown, about six to eight weeks after you bloom. Your foliage must be allowed to soak up energy from the sun so your bulb is nourished enough to produce more flowers the next spring. It saddens me to see you flop over and slowly fade, but if I worked as hard as you did, I’d be doing the same thing.
It is, I confess, hard to suppress my urge to lop off your leaves or weight them down with bricks or tie them up to hide your only ugly stage of life. The best way to handle the awkward period, experts suggest, is to give you companions like daylilies, ferns, or hostas, whose foliage emerges after you are bloomed out, and hides your aging leaves.
You are affordable, too. Many home improvement warehouses and nurseries stock your bulbs in the fall, often as blends of several kinds. That’s when you want to be planted. Now is the time for us to do some daffodil detecting to find the best varieties for our climate, our gardens and our fancies.
The best place to do this is at
the Mid-South Daffodil Society’s Show March 24-25 at The Dixon Gallery and Gardens. At this free event you can get up-close and personal with a huge variety of daffodils thriving in area gardens.
I remember the wonderment I felt while attending my first daffodil show some 25 or so years ago in the DeSoto County Courthouse in Hernando, Mississippi. I saw daffodils with petals so fluffy they looked at bit like yellow carnations next to others with clusters of small flowers attached to their stems. Some were sweetly fragrant; others more orange than yellow; rings of green could be seen at the center of others. Blue ribbons told me and will tell you which ones the judges liked best, too.
Members of the society, like Molly and Kennon Hampton, will be glad to answer questions, too. For Molly to become a show judge certified by the American Daffodil Society, they must have at least 100 varieties representing 8 of the 12 divisions of daffodils in their Rosemark garden. (Divisions are groupings of daffodils with similar characteristics categorized for competition purposes.)
Neither Molly or Kennon, who both grew up on farms just north of Memphis, can remember a spring without daffodils. Both of their mothers, grandmothers, and aunts grew them in abundance. Kennon remembers the fun he had searching for Easter eggs hidden among their flowers and leaves.
Today they live in a house once owned by Molly’s aunt and uncle and are still enjoying the daffodils her relatives planted in the 1940s.
I asked Molly and Ruthie Taylor, who are co-chairing the show along with Kathy Adams and Buff Adams, to share the names of their favorite daffodils for early, mid-season and late blooms.
Early: Gigantic Star, Monal, Jetfire and Tete-a-Tete (miniature), Red Devon, Tweety Bird
Mid-Season: Avalanche, Tahiti, Bravoure, Pink Charm, Avalon
Late Season: Geranium, Salome, Tripartite, Cheerfulness, Sir Winston Churchill, Daphne, Baby Moon, Sun Disc.
You can buy these and other great daffodil bulbs at the sale presented by the Mid-South Daffodil Society, typically on the first weekend of November at The Dixon Gallery and Gardens. In the meantime, get to Googling and you’ll see the nuances of each.
Oh, and one more thing. Daffodils are the cause of a highly contagious disease known by its victims as “yellow fever.” It’s NOT, I stress, the horrible plague that ravished Memphis three times during 1800s. This is a benign condition characterized by an extreme passion for these addictive plants.
