Old glasshouses for apricots and other tender fruits await restoration at Sutton Court, Herefordshire, the property which has been in the Backhouse family for generations; daffodils which were once part of a breeding programme have survived and spread over many years 1. ‘Little Witch’ (Cyclamineus, pre-1921), a Sarah Backhouse hybrid, with Fritillaria meleagris 2; ‘Bittern’ (Miscellaneous, 1921) 3, another Sarah Backhouse hybrid. ‘Empress’ (Trumpet, pre-1869) 4 and ‘C. J. Backhouse’ (Large-cupped, pre-1869) 5, both William Backhouse plants, and also by him, ‘Mrs. Langtry’ (Large-cupped, pre-1869) 6; Mrs. Langtry was a British musical hall singer and high-society courtesan. ‘Conspicuus’ (Small-cupped, pre-1869) 7 and ‘Niveth’ (Triandrus, 1932) 8 are both by Henry Backhouse, Robert’s brother. The double ‘Glowing Phoenix’ (pre-1930) 9 is by Robert Backhouse.
Two years after her death, Robert named ‘Mrs. R. O. Backhouse’ for her and launched it on the world. This was the first pink-cup daffodil. It was a worthy memorial for someone who had undoubtedly been a gifted breeder, and one of the first women to really make a mark in any field of plant breeding. In an obituary in The Garden magazine of 19 February 1921, it was said of her: “Few of the famous raisers of new varieties were less known on committees or at meetings, and it was not very often that she staged many flowers in public, but when she did, it was something like a revelation to see what was there.”
Yet another generation of the Backhouses worked as plant breeders. Robert and Sarah’s son, William Ormston Backhouse (1885–1962), worked with wheat in Argentina, having been trained in the new applied science of plant breeding by two of the great pioneers in the field: William Bateson and Rowland Biffen. The varieties he produced revolutionized wheat production in Argentina, but in his later years he continued in the family tradition to work on daffodils, concentrating on the red, orange, and pink tones, which his parents had done so much to pioneer.
All in all, it is estimated that some 430 varieties of daffodil were raised by the family.
The profits of prophecy
PETER BARR
PETER BARR (1826–1909) appears to have been a colourful character. Photographs show him with a full beard and wisps of hair escaping from below a beret-type hat. Descriptions of him in later life talk of him always wearing country tweeds and Scottish-style hats. The title of his book on daffodils, Ye Narcissus or Daffodyl Flowere Containing Hys Historie and Culture, published in 1884, indicates a kind of faux-historical style which today we would read as affectation. The book in fact doubled as a catalogue (the distinction between the two has always been ambiguous in the garden world); it and another publication put out in the same year by William Baylor Hartland, an Irish grower, were the first daffodil catalogues.
Born in Lanarkshire, Scotland, Barr started out working in a seed shop in Glasgow. Rising through the business he ended up in a partnership in Covent Garden, the market area of London which at the time completely dominated the capital’s fruit, vegetable, and ornamental plant trade. From 1860 onwards he increasingly turned from seed to plants, importing plants and bulbs from the Netherlands and sourcing rarities from amateur growers and botanists. A key moment appears to have been reading Paradisi in sole paradisus terrestris (1629) by John Parkinson, who reported that there were ninety-four varieties of daffodil grown in Britain at the time. Very few of these were still available, a fact which appears to have led Barr to become a daffodil-obsessive. He began to collect as many old varieties as he could, as well as new ones. It was this desire to acquire as much as he could of what today we would call genetic material, that led him to organise the group which bought Edward Leeds’s bulb collection. In addition he bought up bulbs from William Backhouse and Norfolk clergyman and amateur breeder George Gudgeon Nelson (1818–1882).
With a vast range of botanical booty having poured in to Britain over the last hundred years, gardeners and growers in the final decades of the nineteenth century began to join forces with botanists to try to make sense of what was rapidly becoming a confusing scene. Hybridising was now increasingly understood, accepted, and carried out, adding to the confusion of names and the complexity of classification. Barr took the initiative and worked with a Kew botanist to establish a classification system for daffodils. To launch this and to popularize the flower, he persuaded the RHS to hold a daffodil conference in the spring of 1884. One of the resolutions of the conference resulted in the formation of a Narcissus Committee, under the auspices of the society’s Scientific Committee, while another drew a clear red line between horticulture and botany in declaring that a unified system of daffodil naming and classification should be based on criteria used by growers, not those by botanists. It was around this time also that the first book on daffodils since Herbert’s Amaryllidaceae of 1837 was published—F. W. Burbidge’s The Narcissus: Its History and Culture (1875). One irony of this first daffodil conference was that the new committee voted to abolish the latinate names of Barr’s proposed categories and replace them with readily understood English ones. History does not record Barr’s reaction, but he comes across as a phlegmatic man, more than able to overcome minor upsets.
During the latter part of his career, Barr became what we would now call a plant hunter, travelling to those parts of Europe where wild daffodils were numerous and varied, primarily in central and southern France, Spain, and Portugal. He came back not only with many new introductions to stimulate further breeding but was also inspired by the sight of daffodils en masse in woods and fields. He started to promote the idea of mass plantings—what we now call “naturalising”; this must have been good for business, too. His use of daffodils in this way was part of a wider movement across Europe to use plants in a more naturalistic way, the blending of garden and wild plants celebrated in William Robinson’s The Wild Garden (1870).
In 1895 Barr took his sons into partnership, retiring from the business the next year. A year later he was one of the first recipients of the RHS Victoria Medal—the society’s highest honor. Soon he was on his travels again, a total of seven years travelling around the world promoting daffodils, of which two years were spent in southern Africa. We cannot help but wonder how many daffodils the “Daffodil King,” as he was known by this time, actually saw on this great expedition.
One further aspect of Barr’s later work needs to be mentioned—his importation of wild daffodil bulbs from France, Spain, and Portugal. Digging up wild bulbs and exporting them has been widely practiced from the nineteenth century onwards and is only really just coming to an end—under pressure from conservationists who point out just how bad this often is for wild populations. Barr is known to have imported very large quantities of some species, to the extent that he may have had a severe long-term impact on certain species in some localities. Narcissus triandrus is known to have been a particular target of his company’s collecting—it was sold as ‘Queen of Spain’.
Barr’s achievement was to bring daffodils into the gardening mainstream, but it was also to bring together the separate achievements of his predecessors. When he bought the collections of Backhouse, Leeds, and others, he was accumulating the results of separate and independent breeding work; now the fruit of their efforts would be one big genepool, and one which was being promoted with flair. How much he actually bred is open to question; of the 106 varieties registered in the name of Barr & Sons, by the time of his death in 1909, many are almost certainly selections from wild stocks or old varieties.
An eruption of diversity
GEORGE ENGLEHEART AND THE BIRTH OF THE MODERN DAFFODIL
THE LATE NINETEENTH and early twentieth century saw the broad outlines of the modern daffodil evolve, through a kind of artificial Darwinian process. Varieties survived which breeders liked—so the breeder took the place of the forces of natural selection in the evolutionary process. Different breeders bred for different features, and in these early days, these were largely aesthetic. Only later did more functional requirements such as strength of stem or plant robustness become important. A
n odd feature of these years is that some varieties became renowned not for what they were, but for what they could offer; the potential of their genes, in other words, was more important than the plant itself. One such was Rev. George Engleheart’s ‘Will Scarlett’ (pre-1898) a Large-cupped variety with twisted perianth segments and a dramatic orange cup—a feature illustrating its Poeticus background. It was quite unlike anything that had yet been seen, with many disadvantages, but it was widely used for breeding by others.
Engleheart (1851–1936), who worked on daffodils between 1882 and 1923, is often spoken of as the man who really launched the modern daffodil. Like many of the Church of England’s country clergy, he was interested in many things. In his case, archaeology was perhaps as much a passion as daffodil breeding: in 1924 he became involved in a dispute concerning Stonehenge between druid revivalists and archaeologists, over whether the former should be allowed to bury the ashes of their dead members there. Engleheart and fellow archaeologists were much opposed and eventually won their case. Disputes over the use of this key Stone Age monument continue to this day.
Engleheart initially worked with Leeds and Backhouse hybrids and wild species (trying to replicate some of the natural hybrids which Herbert had worked on), but he went on to do much original and adventurous breeding. He was one of the first to work with forms of Poeticus, with results which perhaps laid down tracks that have been followed ever since, as the Poeticus species introduced intense cup colours, which became typical of the Small-cupped division. Some of his varieties were particularly popular with florists in the first half of the twentieth century. He did not keep exact records, confessing as much in a letter to The Brodie (more of him in the next section) in 1917, a letter in which he also states, “I am almost stone-broke over my small bulb-farm,” then in its third season. Eelworm became a problem, and in 1923 he sold his stock, devoting the remainder of his life to archaeology.
Engleheart’s ‘Firebrand’ (Small-cupped, pre-1897) 1 is typical of many late nineteenth-century daffodils, with its star-like appearance, the perianth segments widely separated. Among his other yellows are ‘Helios’ (Large-cupped, pre-1912) 2 and the surprisingly modern-looking ‘Mars’ (Small-cupped, pre-1903) 3. ‘Will Scarlett’ (Large-cupped, pre-1898) 4 was regarded by many as a breakthrough; wrote E. A. Bowles of it in the early 1930s, “Bunches of its gaudy flowers have been selling in the London shops [and] ordinary visitors to the garden always pick it out as the variety they would like to gather and carry away with them.” Engleheart excelled with well-displayed white perianth segments: ‘Beersheba’ (Trumpet, pre-1923) 5, ‘White Emperor’ (Trumpet, pre-1913) 6, ‘Mitylene’ (Large-cupped, pre-1923) 7, ‘Resolute’ (Large-cupped, pre-1897) 8, and ‘Evangeline’ (Small-cupped, 1908) 9. His work with Poeticus is apparent with ‘White Lady’ (Small-cupped, pre-1897) 10, ‘Horace’ (Poeticus, pre-1894) 11, and ‘Albatross’ (Small-cupped, pre-1891) 12. A revival of interest in heirloom varieties can be appreciated with this row of Engleheart’s ‘Lucifer’ (Small-cupped, pre-1897) 13 at New Generation Daffodils in Cornwall; the flowers of such plants are not strong and compared to modern varieties, do not stand rough weather or transport, but their relaxed floppy appearance appeals to many.
Engleheart was very productive, with over 720 cultivars to his name. Kate Donald (a former Daffodil Registrar for the RHS who, with her husband, Duncan, runs Croft 16, an heirloom daffodil collection) reckons they have more Englehearts than anyone else. “He got carried away with the excitement of breeding, he had no plan and was not good at selecting good parents.” She adds, however, that “some were very good,” admitting of the palely ethereal Large-cupped ‘Tenedos’ and white Trumpet ‘Beersheba’ (both pre-1923), “If I had bred them, I would die happy.” Engleheart sold both varieties to The Brodie, who we must suspect earned the benefit of them. Another popular Engleheart white was ‘White Lady’ (Small-cupped, pre-1897), although the Donalds point out that it appears to be a strain rather than a clone, as it shows so much variation. ‘White Lady’ became rapidly outdated—E. A. Bowles, the great twentieth-century writer on bulbs, described how to some its cup “suggests the remains of a slug’s hearty meal,” adding his own damning comment, “Do not look her in the face.”
A military eye
THE BRODIE OF BRODIE
MAJOR IAN BRODIE (1868–1943)—or, to give him his full aristocratic title, The Brodie of Brodie—was a Scottish clan Laird (i.e., tribal chieftain) and professional soldier whose work on daffodils in the earlier years of the twentieth century is not remembered through any particular commercially available cultivars but through a genetic heritage and a personal legend.
The Brodie (as he was always known) had the perfect bio for a British gentleman—Eton and the Guards (i.e., the country’s leading private school followed by the most elite army regiment). He was possibly inspired to take up breeding by the 1884 RHS Daffodil Conference. Almost immediately thereafter, however, he went off to fight in the Boer War. Although his family had no family links to horticulture and Brodie Castle was in a remote location, he seemed to be able to get hold of very good varieties to work with as soon as they were available, e.g., ‘Apricot’ and ‘Victoria’ (both pre-1897 Trumpets), and he had Engleheart’s ‘Blood Orange’ (Small-cupped, pre-1904) even before it was registered. He again saw battle during World War I but devolved much to his wife, Violet, who was always a very active deputy while his staff, led by his head gardener, J. M. Annand, were involved in making crosses back home.
Whereas many other aristocratic daffodil people went off gallivanting around the country during the flowering season (probably using the opportunity to look at each other’s collections as an excuse for socializing), The Brodie stayed at home with his plants. Every flower was de-anthered as it flowered (removing pollen to minimise self-fertilisation), and crosses were made and then recorded in a meticulous stud book. Between 1899 and 1942, he raised thousands of seedlings from his crosses, with trial plots organised with military precision in the old walled kitchen garden. Building very largely on varieties obtained from Engleheart (he went on to buy Engleheart’s stock on his death in 1936), the Brodie made over 12,500 individual crosses but only judged 185 as being worthy of a name (although another 229 were named by those who bought stock from him). Contemporary visitors remarked on how the rows of seedlings were like soldiers on parade, three inches between them in rows eight inches apart; anything not up to scratch was ruthlessly removed to the compost heap.
The Brodie’s stud books enabled the ancestry of all his seedlings to be known, and remarkably they were made accessible to anyone who wanted to see them. The books contain an amazing amount of detail, even being updated with information on the progress of the cross, such as the amount of seed collected, the germination percentages, and finally many years later, details of the flower.
One plant which was often incorrectly attributed to him was ‘Fortune’. The variety had been depleted by various misfortunes, including eelworm—from which Brodie Castle’s remote location may have protected it. The Brodie ended up with the largest number of survivors and had almost a monopoly on its production. So great was the demand that he was selling them at £14 a bulb (the 1920 equivalent of £340), a good return on an original investment of four bulbs (or one—depending upon which source you believe).
The story of ‘Fortune’ illustrates two key points about plant breeding. The first is that it can be difficult to know who is responsible for new varieties; the second is that a variety may be valued not for its own worth, but for its genes, i.e., its potential. ‘Fortune’ was a Large-cupped variety, registered in 1917 by Walter T. Ware of Bath, in southwest England. The company had begun trading in 1883 and from the outset was famous for tulips and daffodils, for its trade with Dutch producers, and for its export business. It is even said that Monet got bulbs for his garden at Giverny from them. When first shown, ‘Fortune’ sparked a sensation: the cup was the richest orange anyone had yet seen, and the perianth segments were bro
ad, flat, and smooth. The whole flower had a proportion and a perfection that had never before been seen. Not only was it sought after as a show plant, but breeders saw the potential to combine the striking cup and form of the plant with other characteristics, and so make their own mark on the world. When first made available, the price for one bulb was £50.
Ware produced eight other varieties of no particular note. It so happened that he had been an agent for one of the garden world’s most intriguing characters of the time, Ellen Willmott (1858–1934). From 1908 to 1911 Willmott had done some daffodil breeding and won some RHS prizes for her varieties; she is said to have had a collection of more than six hundred varieties and is reputed to have made her staff install trip wires around the daffodils in the fields, which would set off air guns to frighten anyone attempting to help themselves. It seems highly likely that Ware was simply taking the credit for Willmott’s work. This is not to imply any sleight of hand; as daffodils can take many years between germination and flowering, it has been quite common throughout daffodil history for growers to sell seedlings to others, who then have to make the decision about whether to pick out possible winners and propagate them.
Unfortunately, modern varieties were planted out at Brodie Castle in the 1980s to help liven up the garden as a visitor attraction—with grave consequence for those who want to track down original Brodie plants. The collection of Brodie varieties is in the old walled garden.
The Daffodil Page 5