There are some intriguing links between ancient monastic sites in Britain and large populations of Narcissus pseudonarcissus or N. obvallaris. For example, it is said that the only large population of wild daffodils in the London area is found at Abbey Wood, Bexley, named after the Medieval Lesney Abbey. Whether the monks were using the plants for herbal medicine, another purpose (possibly as an adhesive), or for decorating the church on festival days is unknown.
Reports of daffodil poisoning occasionally occur, usually because daffodil bulbs have been mistaken for onions. Given the different appearance of the bulbs and the absence of the onion smell it is difficult to believe some of these. One well-attested example was in May 2009 when a number of schoolchildren fell ill at a primary school in Suffolk, England, after a daffodil bulb was added to soup during a cookery class. Symptoms of nausea, confusion, and abdominal pain may continue for several days.
A more serious problem is a skin irritation, or dermatitis, known as daffodil itch, which is something of an occupational hazard for professional pickers and florists. The skin can redden and become itchy, dry, and fissured, the result of calcium oxalate in the sap; this chemical compound is one of several toxins which daffodils have evolved to deter animals from eating them. Some cultivars are noted as being worse than others. Pickers as a consequence are encouraged to wear gloves.
A mid-Victorian British writer on daffodils mentions that there was a common belief at the time that the scent of daffodils is harmful, especially that of the most strongly fragrant: Tazettas and Jonquils. Headaches and even madness were said to be the result. Reactions to scent vary greatly between people, with some individuals claiming to physically suffer when exposed to certain strong smells. Often these are scents which others find utterly alluring, such as lilies, so a psychological rather than physical explanation may be more appropriate.
Wherever daffodils flourish they are often grown commercially, primarily for cut flowers. In Britain, Cornwall and Lincolnshire are the main growing areas. Often only a small proportion of the flowers are picked, which makes for spectacular scenes with flowers replacing the more usual arable crops to be found in fields. The range of varieties grown on this scale seems to be steadily increasing so the fields are by no means a uniform yellow, as can be seen in these Cornish ones.
Not just a flower
THE SYMBOLISM OF DAFFODILS
AS A SPRING FLOWER, it is no surprise that daffodils are seen as a symbol of rebirth and new life in many different cultures. In China what are called paperwhites in English (various forms of Narcissus papyraceus) are used to celebrate Spring Festival (New Year), the most important Chinese festival, around late January or early February. Traditionally, bulbs are grown without soil, set out on pebbles in shallow plates with their roots growing down into water in the bottom of the plate. In some cases, containers may be used to hold hundreds of bulbs. The plant is not native to China, but the practice is centuries old at least, and bulbs must originally have come from the Middle East along the Silk Road through central Asia. In those Asian cultures which celebrate the pre-Islamic spring festival of Nawroz, various spring flowers are used, with the Kurds of the Middle East using mostly the daffodil.
In western and central Europe, daffodils are often used to adorn churches as part of celebrations of spring and the resurrection of Christ. In Medieval Christian art, the flower is used as a symbol of paradise, and triumph over death; it is often associated with the Virgin Mary. In the Muslim Middle East it may, somewhat paradoxically, be seen as a symbol of death and planted on graves, because its growth in spring reminds people of the life to come. In classical Arabic poetry, Poeticus daffodils are seen as having “eyes” and therefore of being the eyes of the garden as well as being symbols of love, longing, and desire.
Daffodils have become the centres of festivals and festivities in some countries; in Newent, Gloucestershire, England, this can be seen as an active process as we shall see later. The Narzissenfest in the small town of Altaussee in Styria, Austria, attracts thousands of people every year; indeed it is one of the biggest floral festivals in the country, although nowadays the role of the daffodil in this four-day festival in May seems to be more of an excuse for a civic celebration and general merrymaking than anything intrinsically floral or horticultural. The event involves the selection of a young woman as a “daffodil Queen,” a parade with large floats, and a procession of boats on one of two local lakes, the boats supporting elaborate sculptures of cartoon-like animals often incorporating thousands of daffodil flowers.
Cultivated daffodils are descended from a small number of original species. There are, however, around thirty wild species to be found in southern Europe and the Maghreb (northwest Africa). Two are Narcissus calcicola 1 and N. cordubensis 2, both from Spain. Over the last hundred years, some of these smaller species have been used in breeding new varieties, usually smaller plants for garden use, such as ‘Itzim’ 3, bred from the rare Spanish species N. cyclamineus by American breeder Grant Mitsch (1982). Modern breeders are now working with a very wide range of genetic material derived from all wild species of Narcissus—the results will be seen in years to come as new varieties become available.
Wales (or Cymru in Welsh) has a strong association with the daffodil, the flower being a national symbol. Unlike its original symbol, the dragon, which is of great antiquity (copied from Chinese silk imported during Roman times), the daffodil has represented the country for only about a century. It has been suggested that the reason for its becoming a national symbol is simply either confusion or fashion. The nation’s original national plant was the leek (in Welsh, cenhinen), and the daffodil is often known as cenhinen Pedr (i.e., [St.] Peter’s leek). The national day is St. David’s Day (1 March, often seen as the first day of spring), and it has to be said that daffodils do make a more attractive emblem than a leek, especially when worn as a boutonnière. The widespread use of the flower as a national symbol probably dates back to the early twentieth century, when David Lloyd George, the first Welsh-born prime minister of the United Kingdom, started to wear it on St. David’s Day; it was also used in ceremonies in 1911 to mark the investiture of the Prince of Wales at Caernarfon in north Wales.
Since the early 1990s, the daffodil has begun to acquire a new signification—that of hope for cancer patients. Promoted by the Marie Curie Cancer Care charity, the flower is used in the United Kingdom, in Ireland, and increasingly in other anglophone countries, as a symbol during the Great Daffodil Appeal, a fundraising week held early every March. In 2008, the charity had a new Jonquil named ‘Marie Curie Diamond’ to celebrate their Diamond Jubilee. The lesson perhaps is that traditions of symbolism are never static.
Reading a flower
THE DAFFODIL AS ROMANTIC EMBLEM
AS THE MOST COMMON and robust spring flower, the daffodil has inevitably become a symbol of the season, decorating any kind of merchandizing material which happens at this time of year, as well as decorations in churches and the garden and porch tableaux popular in the United States. This popular image of the daffodil as representing the force of nature in spring has been given an extra boost by the popularity of a poem by William Wordsworth, one of the best-known poets of both Great Britain and of the Romantic era as a whole.
I wandered lonely as a Cloud
That floats on high o’er Vales and Hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd
A host of dancing Daffodils;
Along the Lake, beneath the trees,
Ten thousand dancing in the breeze.
The waves beside them danced, but they
Outdid the sparkling waves in glee:—
A poet could not but be gay
In such a laughing company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:
For oft when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss o
f solitude,
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the Daffodils.
The poem recalls 15 April 1802, on which day the poet and his sister Dorothy walked along the shore of Ullswater, in the English Lake District. Dorothy recorded in her journal how astounded they were by the numbers of the flower, mostly grouped but some scattered. The area is still famous for daffodils today.
The poem was published in 1807 as part of a collection (Poems in Two Volumes). A revised version was published in 1815. Over the years it has become one of the most famous poems in English and a national favourite in Britain, studied at school by children and endlessly quoted. The poem is now seen as one of the crucial texts of the Romantic Movement, which dominated north European culture during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Romanticism started as a reaction to the early phases of industrialization and by extension to the Enlightenment, an earlier phase of European intellectual life which had stressed rationality. Romanticism stressed the personal experience, particularly the deep personal experience of nature or of emotion. The first line emphasizes the feeling of the individual; “lonely” at the time meant “alone” in a positive sense, not isolated, as it does now. The flowers are anthropomorphized—they dance and laugh, they are said to feel “glee,” an emotion which is communicated to the poet (and presumably his sister too, although she is absent from the poem). This unity of feeling, between one part of creation and another, and of course with the artist, is a strong strand in Romantic thinking.
The Lake District itself later became one of the key sites of Victorian tourism, with the area around Lake Windermere filling with the summer villas of the wealthier middle classes. It was one of the most accessible areas of dramatic scenery to the main areas of manufacturing of the country, and the association of the area with the Romantic poets and Wordsworth’s daffodils helped boost its popularity.
Like other pieces of great literature the poem has itself become a literary object, most notably in Jamaica Kincaid’s 1990 novel Lucy. Kincaid herself is of Afro-Caribbean origin, and in Lucy, the heroine, a young woman in the Caribbean, recalls having to memorize the poem at school and feeling nothing for it, as daffodils do not grow in her homeland. The daffodils are a lightning rod for her intense feelings of alienation: she is seen as British and yet does not feel British. The poem and the flower therefore come to represent cultural imperialism in a writer noted for her post-colonial approach.
Kincaid, for her part, is fond of daffodils. A Caribbean blog noted in 2009 that she had over ten thousand in her garden and quoted her thus: “It dawned on me that it would look nice, and I wanted to vindicate Wordsworth … After all, it was not Wordsworth’s fault that he was implicated in colonialism.”
In an example of the growing and spreading power of the daffodil as a symbolic element in our culture, in 2004 the poem was read aloud by 150,000 schoolchildren across Britain, to celebrate the two hundredth anniversary of its writing, in an event organised by Marie Curie Cancer Care. In 2007, Cumbria Tourism attempted to gain a younger audience for the Lake District area by releasing a rap version, voiced by MC Nuts, a Lake District red squirrel. From the sublime to the ridiculous?
“Wild,” but almost certainly naturalised, daffodils, by the shores of Ullswater, in the English Lake District. These, like nearly all the wild daffodils of the British Isles, are Narcissus pseudonarcissus.
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Daffodil Definitions
We all know what daffodils are, even though there may be some confusion as to where daffodils end and narcissus begin. Here, the intention is to take an overview of the broad categories of daffodil, mapping out the ground, so that we can make more sense of the flower’s diversity. Before we start, we need to think about how daffodils reproduce and (by humans) get propagated.
Understanding a flower
DAFFODIL LIFE AND REPRODUCTION
LIKE ALL LIVING THINGS, daffodils are defined by their genes. Wild species spread themselves and their genes through seeds, and to a very limited extent by their bulbs dividing. The former is a sexual process, the result of an insect (usually a bee) visiting the flower, and involves a mixing of genes between parents, so that there is always at least some variation in the offspring. The latter is a vegetative, clonal process, so the daughter bulbs will be genetically identical to the parent.
Daffodil seed, like most bulb seed, is heavy. Which means that it does not travel on the wind like thistledown but instead falls near the parent plant. In nature, without occasional accidents, like landslides or floods, the rate of natural daffodil spread is slow. Commercial production is also relatively slow compared to that of many plants. Because daffodils sown from seed are so variable (the result of the lottery of sexual reproduction) the consistent production of a variety can only be achieved through the propagation of bulbs. Daffodils cannot be mass-produced from cuttings like many trees and shrubs, and even when the bulbs are skillfully divided the rate of increase is slow. Each new variety starts out as one bulb grown from one seed, and so all the plants of one named variety are genetically identical, members of a clone. At least that is the situation now. In the early days of daffodil breeding, a variety name might be given to all the bulbs derived from seedlings grown from the same seedpod, which were not all identical. As well in early days, demand for a new variety occasionally outstripped supply, and so very similar plants might be substituted; this is possibly the case with the well-known ‘King Alfred’ (1899): heritage daffodil specialists now do not know which of several clones is the real monarch.
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. Usually not: of the thousands of seedlings raised, very few are worthy of further selection.
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.
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). Many flowers, including tulips, lilies, and daffodils, have sepals which are practically identical to and function as petals—together the sepals and petals are called the perianth, the individual petal-like structures perianth segments. 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.
The Daffodil Page 2