Identifying old varieties was a major headache but largely solved through the involvement of Kate Donald and of Dan du Plessis until his death in 2001. Now visitors can come and admire the delicate beauty of pale cream ‘Sunrise’, primitive doubles like ‘Butter and Eggs’, and the grandeur of ‘Emperor’. Quality Daffodils, the business run by Ron Scamp, has also got involved and is making it possible for the Trust to sell bulbs of heritage varieties to visitors.
5
Breeders and Conservers
DAFFODIL PEOPLE
In 1910 the Rev. W. Wilks was astounded to find nearly 2,500 names in the RHS List of Daffodil Names. “Amateurs are already satiated with the multiplicity of extravagantly priced varieties,” he wrote, wonderingly. “Is there anything in the same line which so greatly exceeds the old, old, Gloria Mundi? Is there anything … so greatly in advance of Emperor, Empress, Horsfieldii, [or] Barrii Conspicuus?”
It is a burning question. Why do people continue to breed plants after an acceptable garden plant has been produced? That there is always room for improvement might be one answer: plants can be bred for a longer flowering season, earlier flowering, stronger stems, better scent, disease resistance. Such factors explain the commercial focus of some breeding programmes. There is also the desire to perfect, like that of the craftsman who feels that nothing they make is ever quite good enough. Additionally there is the desire to create novelty, based on bringing together characteristics from different daffodil varieties or species, typically a characteristic from a minority-interest or culturally difficult species or variety and a more robust and easy-to-grow one. Undeniably there is an element of personal obsession, and it is this obsession which makes the daffodil truly a cult plant, one lifted beyond the natural or the functional or merely beautiful, but the object of a constant unfulfilled longing for the unattainable.
Here we will look at the process of breeding and the work of some modern breeders, but beforehand it might be interesting to look at some of the aesthetic issues involved. What flowers people like is a personal matter, and the gardening public and daffodil devotees are clearly divided. Personal preferences and indeed passions are aroused primarily over two issues: flower size and flower shape—in particular, how far flower shape deviates from the daffodil “norm.”
Nearly all the breeders I spoke to agree that the public are wanting smaller daffodils, partly because many now garden tiny urban plots or can only plant in containers. There is also a strong tendency towards an appreciation of the natural-looking across the gardening world; smaller daffodil varieties may be no more “natural” than large ones, but they tend to look it. In some ways this can be seen as part of a wider movement, which values the traditional, the local, and the supposedly authentic, against the modern, the hi-tech, and the corporate.
Among modern daffodils there are several trends which spark particularly vehement reactions of antipathy: large flowers, doubles, and Split-coronas. Some flower sizes are now so big (in excess of 10cm/4 inches) that to many of us they look not only artificial but ungainly, as if familiar flowers had been fed on steroids. Doubles always stir strong emotions, with a minority of gardeners disliking almost any doubles. Double daffodils seem to evoke particular venom, possibly because the classic image of the flower is one so strongly associated with nature and the romance and simple beauties of spring. Thanks to its cup, the daffodil has a unique shape among flowers, and for many of us, once it loses this distinction, it loses its raison d’être and its soul. Although we know that nearly all the daffodils we see along roadsides are planted, there is part of us which wants to believe that they are wild—which we cannot believe if they are double.
It is Split-corona varieties, however, which earn particular hatred; for many of us, the splaying out of the cup is the grossest denial of the whole essence of what a daffodil is about. Split-coronas are very much a modern development, with very few being known before the 1950s. ‘Buttonhole’ was one of the first, bred in the Netherlands in the early 1920s; Mrs. Backhouse produced one around the same time, which she called ‘Joker’—which perhaps illustrates what she thought about it. “They look as if they have been flattened with a rolling pin”; “Daffodils which resemble a pancake ought not to be exhibited” are two of many comments which veteran breeder Brian Duncan has collected over the years; he himself eventually decided he liked them enough to register around twenty varieties during the 2000s. Matthew Zandbergen probably spoke for many in the daffodil community when once he said, “Let there be no racial prejudice in our daffodil family.”
Ron Scamp
CORNWALL
FOR RON SCAMP, “Cornwall is the world centre of the daffodil business. It’s a perfect climate for them—we can have them in flower from December to the end of April, and sometimes longer.” Ron’s company, Quality Daffodils, currently offers far and away the largest selection of varieties anywhere, ranging from new hybrids to heritage cultivars snatched from the jaws of extinction. Ron was brought up on a family flower farm in the Tamar Valley; his uncle was Dan du Plessis, who became his mentor when he started growing, breeding, and showing in the 1970s. “It was as a hobby at first,” he recalls, “but it became an obsession and, in the 1990s, a business.” At first his company offered seven hundred varieties but now has around three thousand.
Ron says that he breeds new varieties “for the discerning gardener, with the cut-flower grower a good spin-off.” Good plants, he says, “have to have good foliage, a strong stem, and a good bud which opens well.” Although his stated goals in breeding are new colours, new combinations, and improved colour intensity (“Most of all I would like to breed a white with a red trumpet”), he values “the strength of flower and stem [as] the first criterion”—in other words, “it does not matter if a cross has a wonderful flower: if it can’t stand up straight, it’s no good … Scent is nice, and it helps in going back to the species for scent … Resistance to fusarium is also important; vulnerability to this disease is a problem with deep genetic roots. Research into isolating the gene responsible is possible, but there aren’t funds currently available.”
Like all hybridisers, Ron also breeds “for show”: “Exhibitors are the shop window for tomorrow’s commercial varieties.” Once a variety has proved itself as an exhibition plant, other possibilities open up, primarily the cut-flower trade and mass propagation for public and private gardeners. There is a relationship between these two aspects of the trade—it is not as if they compete for the same bulbs: “The flower growers need predictable top-quality bulbs, but their rejects are still quality and often end up in garden centres.”
Patience is a primary virtue among daffodil breeders, even more than is usual in plant breeding. It takes at least four years to get a daffodil to flower from seed and, Ron says, five years’ evaluation after that “before even thinking about naming it—and, if you have been propagating it, there could still be only fifty to sixty bulbs by [then].”
Well before a variety starts to appear in florist’s shops or garden centres, it has to be, in the key phrase of the whole plant-growing business, “bulked up.” Bulking up is the process of starting with one plant and ending up with however many are needed for a commercial launch, which in the case of daffodils means hundreds of thousands. With some plants this can be done very quickly, but with daffodils, the process is still slow. One day, no doubt, laboratory-based biotechnology will enable us to go from novelty cross to garden centre pinup in a few years, but not yet. Traditional propagation techniques, and the real skill involved in applying them, is what lies between the breeder’s cherished new plant and the brown paper bag or plastic net of bulbs which the amateur gardener pulls open in hope and expectation as they prepare to plant them. “The Dutch are the master propagators,” explains Ron, “especially for garden varieties. Chipping is the main means of propagating—one bulb can be cut into six to eight pieces, each producing three or four bulbils, which can flower in three years’ time. Once they are big enough they can then be chip
ped, and the process goes on … If all goes well, it is possible to go from one to 100,000 in ten years using chipping.” This is considerably faster than relying on natural increase.
A selection of Ron Scamp’s daffodils. ‘Trecara’ (2001) 1, a Small-cupped variety for mid to late season, which illustrates well what the daffodil breeding of the twentieth century focussed on—solid perianth segments of “good substance,” well able to withstand handling and forming a full and relatively flat background for the corona. ‘Rebekah’ (1997) 2 is a late-season double. ‘Saint Day’ (2000) 3 is a mid-season dwarf Triandrus. ‘Katherine Jenkins’ (2007) 4 is a mid-season Jonquil.
So, in the end, it takes at least a total of thirteen to fifteen years for a new variety to get into specialist commercial production. It may take still another decade, and possibly longer, before it becomes plentiful and cheap enough to make much of an impact on the amateur market. This process is a very indeterminate one, as unlike many other plants, where quick-to-propagate plant varieties can be fast-tracked from breeder’s bench to market in a few years if a company decides to promote it, the slow pace of daffodil production is much more market-led. And many variables will affect a new variety’s reception at each stage:
• Has it inspired enough exhibitors to continue to show it from among all the other new varieties?
• Has it continued to win prizes?
• Has it survived enough spring storms, outbreaks of disease, and other unpredictable events, with flowers still held high, to convince growers that it is more than just a pretty face at a show?
• Have enough dedicated growers bought and exhibited the plant to convince a grower to propagate enough bulbs to enable them to offer it to the mail-order bulb specialist? This is a crucial stage, as this is when a variety breaks out of the world of only being grown by daffodil enthusiasts, to being grown by keen gardeners, people like this writer, who grow a wide range of plants and like to integrate daffodils in amongst other plants that they grow. At this stage, a variety can often reach a kind of equilibrium, as a popular variety with keen gardeners or perhaps cut-flower growers, but not really getting much further.
• Does its sales and its wider profile (write-ups in garden magazines, mentions in books, appearances on TV spring garden programmes, etc.) convince a major grower that the plant is worth bulk-propagating, in order to sell on to the wholesale bulb trade?
It goes without saying that the position of a variety on this ladder, from breeder’s bench to garden centre bin, is very much reflected in price. New varieties, with real show potential, can sell for as much as £50 each. This may sound a lot to most gardeners but is much less than the early years of the twentieth century, as was seen with ‘Fortune’. Even varieties listed in catalogues by the 1920s could be selling for as much as £900 at today’s prices. Interestingly, a high price for a new variety seems to have been a very poor predictor of future value; there is no relationship between a bulb’s being expensive in the listings of the leading supplier of the time (Barr & Sons) and its future popularity, its likelihood of winning an award from the RHS, or even its survival.
Ron has registered around three hundred new varieties, across all divisions. He has produced some fine doubles, such as ‘Heamoor’ (1996), which has particularly neat and elegantly arranged petals, the rich yellow ‘Gossmoor’ (2000), and the orange-centred ‘Madam Speaker’ (1998). This last was named for the first woman Speaker of Britain’s House of Commons, Betty Boothroyd; it is, Ron notes, “as robust as the lady, stands up well to the elements, and [is] admired by all who see it.” He has also bred some Jonquils, like ‘An-Gof’ (1999), with a green, yellow, and orange cup (“the first of this colour in the division”), and some Split-coronas (“which appeal to the cut-flower trade”), such as ‘Jack Wood’ (1997), a variety he calls “probably the best show form flower in this division we have yet—rich golden shades with a flat corona of slightly darker tone with a touch of orange at the rim.” Both this and ‘An-Gof’ are vigorous and increase well—both absolutely essential for a commercial future. In his ongoing breeding, Ron says how he is “going back to the older Poeticus hybrids.” Reaching back into the past is a common pattern in many areas of plant breeding; it tends to happen when breeders feel they have reached a plateau or need some more material to work with.
Like most breeders I spoke to, Ron sees a definite trend towards dwarfer daffodils. “There are,” he notes, “a lot of interesting miniatures, but also too many which are not garden-worthy, often derived from Iberian species.” Having had failures with several Alec Gray miniatures myself, I understand. In sum, Ron echoes what at least three other people mentioned to me in the course of researching this book: “Everyone is after the next ‘Tête-â-Tête’,” he says—and adds, tantalizingly, “I’ve got a feeling that Harold Koopowitz is sitting on it.”
Ron is keen to stress how he sees “the daffodil world as a unique fraternity, a bit of keeping secrets but people are very free with pollen and pretty open about their methods—breeders are very competitive, but in a friendly way.” To the outsider, one new variety may look much like another; Ron himself is almost inclined to agree: “I’ve named daffodils and sometimes seen someone else’s and you can’t tell the difference.” As with other plant species with high public profiles (particularly roses), there are demands from various quarters to name new varieties for publicity purposes. In 2008, for example, Ron named a plant ‘Marie Curie’ for the cancer charity’s Diamond Jubilee, and in 2008 ‘Undeb Rygbi Cymru/Welsh Rugby Union’ for the sporting organisation, who perhaps predictably planted it out at their national stadium in Cardiff.
There is one intriguing little coda to Ron’s breeding programme. It is possible to buy his new varieties for very little money, in fact at bargain basement prices. There is a catch, however: there is no way of identifying them! During the lifting and grading process, some bulbs get rejected—they are healthy but too small for him to bother growing on, or they are varieties he has decided not to carry on with, or they fall out of trays or in other ways lose their identities. These discarded bulbs are sent off to a commercial grower, who then grows them on for three years, before selling them. “We call it the rainbow mix,” Ron says. “People do not know what they are going to get—could be some very good new ones, but there is no easy way of knowing them.” In 2010 he reckons he sold some 450 bags this way, each of one hundred bulbs.
Elise and Richard Havens
HUBBARD, OREGON
NOT SURPRISINGLY, Elise Havens, daughter of key American breeder Grant Mitsch, has been hybridising daffodils since her college days. She started out as a computer programmer “in the early days of computing,” while her husband, Richard, was a science teacher. “In 1978,” she says, “we decided to go fulltime. We were mid-thirties, we bought a farm—my father had put out his fiftieth catalogue, and we bought the business off him.” She describes the climate of her home region—the Pacific Northwest—as “ideal.” Much of the hybridising done in the United States happens here, in fact, but “the region has been relatively late to start shows, although they are surprisingly widely distributed across the U.S.”
Elise agrees with many other breeders in her feeling that “the trend is very definitely for smaller plants.” She continues, “My father did a lot of miniatures and upper divisions—the U.S. has historically had a longer interest in upper divisions than most other countries—and new miniature varieties sell out very fast.” Although the Havenses work with a very wide range of daffodil varieties, their interest clearly remains with these smaller-flowered plants. Sterility is often a problem with the upper divisions: if a hybrid is sterile, its genetic material cannot be taken any further, and so it becomes a dead end. As Elise describes it, “We are trying to use fertile varieties to widen the colour range; in Jonquils particularly, we have got some good pinks and yellows in recent years. [E]arlier I did more work in division 3 [Small-cupped], trying to get some more pinks, and to develop a true red—also, reverse bicolours.”
So far, Elise and Richard have registered nearly three hundred varieties.
Aesthetics can take a breeder only so far. In fact, it should perhaps be said that a breeder who works exclusively with the visual qualities of their plants will never achieve much. Physical resilience is important, and disease resistance particularly vital. Elise and Richard found that ‘Daydream’ (a reverse bicolour Large-cupped, registered by Grant Mitsch in 1960), which had been the cornerstone of their breeding programme, increasingly began to suffer from basal rot. “And so we had to move on plant health and find varieties resistant to fungi.” With Jonquils, Elise is working on improving the form of the plant and, as with all the upper divisions, to widen the colour range.
Some of the varieties which Elise and Richard Havens feel best express their work. ‘Emerald Empire’ (Large-cupped, 1998) 1, “one of our favourites of the green eyes—the very white flower with symmetrical form is a real beauty in our opinion.” ‘Oregon Pioneer’ (Large-cupped, 1995) 2 explores the possibilities of a pink and yellow in combination. ‘Perpetuation’ (Jonquil, 1995) 3, “one of our fertile Jonquils which has done exceptionally well in shows and in the garden; it is a considerable improvement over ‘Pipit’ [a popular Jonquil], one of my father’s flowers from the early 1960s.”
“It’s a challenge,” says Elise. “There are so many things to be done … I have an innate love of the flower, I’ve had it all my life. I want to improve it. It’s important for us that we have plants that are excellent garden plants and not just good show flowers.” She counts intuition and experience as the most important things in the breeding process but allows that scientific information is increasingly vital. Knowledge of chromosome counts is especially important for upper divisions, as if chromosome numbers do not match up between two potential “parents,” then successful pollination is impossible.
The Daffodil Page 9