Brent and Becky Heath
GLOUCESTER, VIRGINIA
Among Brent and Becky Heath’s output of new varieties are ‘Katie Heath’ (2002) 1, a Triandrus, selected for being long-lasting and sturdy; ‘Baby Boomer’ (2008) 2, a short-growing Jonquil with five to ten flowers per stem and very fragrant; and ‘Golden Echo’ (2003) 3, another Jonquil, of average height and a strong grower. ‘Tiny Bubbles’ (2009) 4 is a complex cross, so counts as a Miscellaneous variety; very dwarf at only 15cm (6 inches), free-flowering, and fragrant, it is the kind of variety which the Heaths see as having a great future in small urban gardens.
BRENT AND BECKY HEATH have one of the most comprehensive ranges of bulbs for sale in the United States. Daffodils, though, are the core of the business and their real passion. Brent in fact is the third generation of his family in the daffodil business. He describes how his grandfather, Charles, who was living in Massachusetts at the time, ate a cantaloupe for breakfast and loved it so much, he tracked down the grower in Virginia. He went to visit the grower, to schedule regular deliveries of the fruit, and while he was there, noticed large colonies of daffodils in the area; they had established from early introductions and grown so extensively that local people were cutting and sending them off to the cities. He too got into the bulb and cut-flower business, but, having worked in the U.S. consular service in Europe, he was familiar with more modern varieties, with longer and stronger stems, so he began to import bulbs. Brent’s father, George, had one of the largest collection of daffodils in the United States by the time Brent was born. His passion for daffodils was passed on to Brent, and the boy quickly became an expert. Later in life, Brent became friends with Grant Mitsch, who took the young man under his wing, showed him the business, and passed on his knowledge of hybridisation.
The Heath family business is basically retailing, buying in bulbs from growers around the world and with whom they have built relationships; indeed, they have trial gardens in both the Netherlands and Virginia, where blooming time, reproduction rate, and other key aspects of plant performance can be noted. They undertake some breeding but are very clearly focussed. “A younger generation of gardeners is downsizing with daffodils,” says Becky. “They want smaller, neater plants, to grow in containers that fit into their smaller homes and to have them among perennials.” So far, Brent and Becky have registered around thirty varieties, many of these being Jonquils, which have always been important in the American South. “We concentrate,” says Becky, “on developing very strong plants, with more fragrance, and we are more interested in great garden plants than just good show plants.”
Robert Spotts
OAKLEY, CALIFORNIA
“I HAD NEVER SEEN a daffodil until 1975, when I was nearly forty, as I was born and lived in the Arizona desert,” reports Bob Spotts. “When I moved to northern California, I was really taken by daffodil forms and started growing them. I met Sidney DuBose [another prominent U.S. breeder], who became my mentor and encouraged me to start hybridising [and] through Sidney I met Manuel Lima, a recluse, whose solitary aim was to create a green daffodil—I was very taken with Manuel’s seedlings and have worked on this for over fifteen years.”
The green daffodil is only part of Bob’s breeding programme; he has named around thirty-five varieties, across a wide range of divisions, with one in particular, ‘Kokopelli’ (1993), a miniature Jonquil with rounded tepals, being a particular commercial success. Bob believes he has more with potential in the pipeline.
Bob is a retired mathematician who had worked as an education programme analyst. “Hybridising,” he says, “I consider to be an art rather than a science. As a mathematician I appreciate symmetry; it’s very important to me. For example, I like to work on spider daffodils.” These are varieties with narrow perianth segments, which go against a strong, long-term trend in breeding towards full, rounded flowers. “Sometimes,” he says, “there is a mismatch between what show judges like and what the public likes.”
The quest for a green daffodil may seem an eccentric one, but in fact there is a green species, Narcissus viridiflorus, very often tagged “mysterious.” From the mountains of southern Spain and North Africa, this is an autumn-flowering plant with star-like and intensely fragrant flowers of an odd murky green. In cultivation it has proved somewhat erratic, although Bob points out that its blooms last for a long time and it appears to do well in central and southern California. With viridiflorus genes, Bob can work at both the green colour and the spider shape. Among the varieties he has produced using N. viridiflorus have been ‘Spider Woman’ (Small-cupped, 2006), yellow with an orange corona, and a very distinct star shape; and ‘Mesa Verde’ (Large-cupped, 2001), with a distinct greenish tinge. ‘Spider Woman’ is named for the goddess in Navajo creation mythology. Many of Bob’s names reflect an interest in the Southwest and its rich Native American heritage.
Of Bob Spotts’s highly innovative breeding, ‘Kokopelli’ (1993) 1 is the best known representative, a mid to late season dwarf Jonquil. ‘Spider Woman’ (2006) 2 is an early to mid season Small-cupped, named, as is ‘Kokopelli’, for a Navajo deity. This unnamed seedling 3 is a good example of Spotts’s adventurous work, the result of a cross between the relatively conventional Small-cupped ‘Triple Crown’ with a hybrid of ‘Actaea’, an old Poeticus variety, and Narcissus viridiflorus. Plants with such a wide genetic base could represent the future for daffodils.
“The drive,” says Bob, “is to create something extremely pleasing, but also recognition.” There have clearly been hard times, as he warns other breeders: “I learned by bitter experience to keep your plants on your own land, otherwise terrible things can happen … I had plants on someone else’s property once and lost about ten years’ work through their being carelessly destroyed.” Now, at this stage in his career as a breeder, he seems to be creating a genuinely distinct look, one which even those new to the daffodil world might be able to recognize as having a very personal stamp on them. He recalls the words of a renowned orchid and daffodil breeder: “Harold Koopowitz once said to me, ‘Don’t get in line, create your own line.’”
Harold Koopowitz
NORTH TUSTIN, CALIFORNIA
HAROLD KOOPOWITZ is interesting and unusual as a breeder in that he is a plant scientist by profession—Professor Emeritus of Ecology at the University of California at Irvine, after having spent a lifetime working on plant reproductive biology, applying this to both ornamental horticulture and conservation.
He describes himself as having always been interested in plant life (“I was fascinated by bulbs as a child; I remember asking my mother how you make new plants”), and he found daffodils “particularly alluring.” As a graduate student, he “imported some bulbs from Holland[,] one of which was ‘Newcastle’ [a 1957 Large-cupped bicolour]; I was blown away by the flower, and thought I must get more of these.” A classic book on daffodils—Michael Jefferson-Brown’s Daffodils and Narcissi (1969) was a major inspiration, and it was reading this that convinced him he should have a go at breeding. “It’s fun and creative,” he says, “but you are gambling—it’s like playing roulette, but it takes five to six years for the wheel to stop spinning.”
Harold got side-tracked into orchid breeding (Paphiopedilum, slipper orchids), a commercial venture, and “neglected daffodils for twenty years.” When he got back to them he made a wise decision; realising that he could not compete with Grant Mitsch and Brian Duncan (a leading Northern Irish breeder), he decided to “go back and do things differently.” He identified two areas where new daffodil breeding was needed. One was the handful of autumn-flowering species, whose potential had almost never been tapped, possibly because they come from a region with a climate different to others (mountain areas with dry summers); another was the scope for breeding miniatures, where he saw a capacity to express a far wider range of colour and form.
A selection of Harold Koopowitz’s breeding. An unnamed seedling 1, this clone is typical of daffodils that have ‘Emerald Sea’ in their
background. ‘Emerald Sea’ was originally made by John Hunter in New Zealand, and Harold has used it extensively to make autumn-flowering hybrids. Another unnamed seedling 2 descended from ‘Emerald Sea’, whose green coloring and reflexed tepals come (originally) from Narcissus viridiflorus. ‘Itsy Bitsy Splitsy’ (2007) 3 is a rare example of a dwarf Split-corona; it has been recognized with the Brian and Betty Duncan innovation award from the American Daffodil Society and the Ralph B. White medal from the RHS. ‘Puppy Love’ (2007) 4 is a dwarf, of which Harold says, “Miniatures with this coloring, form, and small size in Large-cupped are almost unknown—the corona coloring develops to a salmon pink.”
A knowledge of reproduction ecology and access to biotechnology facilities enables Harold to do things which other breeders cannot—for example, to take sterile varieties and convert them to fertile polyploids. At one stage he tried “embryo rescue,” a technique which has proved very useful in crop plant breeding, but he confesses that “when the results flowered, they were disastrous.”
Another reason that Harold Koopowitz is unusual among daffodil breeders is that he has experience with breeding other plants. “I took an orchid approach to breeding—if you get stuck, look around for some new species to breed in … Don’t stay in one track.”
Breeding for Harold is “science and art interacting: you use the science for creating new material but then aesthetics takes over. You breed towards a goal, but the nearer you get towards a goal, the more difficult it becomes to achieve it.” Several varieties are being commercially trialled, out of nearly forty he has registered.
Preserving the past
HEIRLOOM DAFFODILS
THE APPRECIATION AND CULTIVATION of old varieties, “heirlooms,” has become an important part of the current garden scene, on both sides of the Atlantic. The pioneer here was Graham Stuart Thomas (1909–2003), who worked for the UK’s National Trust for many years; his work with old roses brought many back from the cusp of extinction and did a great deal to popularize them. Names become separated from plants with remarkable ease, as any gardener will know. Bulbs, however, present particular problems, as they disappear so totally for much of the year, so labels go astray even faster than with perennials or woody plants.
Ron Scamp started collecting old varieties many years ago: “Despite scepticism from colleagues, I thought they were important to keep, at least the pre-1940 varieties. I’ve now got several hundred.” These are not just an important breeding resource but also a part of the business, as his catalogue now has a section for heirloom varieties.
The most systematic collectors of old daffodils are Kate and Duncan Donald, who live and grow their plants in the incredible natural beauty of Loch Ewe on the northwest coast of Scotland. Rows of daffodil clumps are lined up around their croft house and an impressive wind turbine—a reminder that although the climate here is very mild, the wind is a big part of life.
Kate had a childhood love of daffodils, which was rekindled by a scholarship year at Tresco Abbey Gardens on the Scilly Isles in the late 1970s. In 1983 she became RHS Daffodil Registrar, and because of this was asked by the National Trust for Scotland to create a National Collection of daffodils at Brodie Castle. “I was always more interested in the older varieties,” Kate says. “They still come up in gardens decades after they have been planted, which shows they are survivors and therefore proven, unlike modern show varieties, which are an unknown quantity. They have an unsophisticated charm … and softer, more luminous colours.”
Duncan adds, “We got interested in making a collection of old daffodils in the 1980s. [At the time] I was curator of the Chelsea Physic Garden in London [and] we had some bad storms then—a large tree blew over on top of a heritage daffodil collection—it really focussed our minds.”
The Donalds made 1935 the cut off point for their collection. Why? Kate explains: “This was when ‘Fortune’-derived varieties began to become important—‘Fortune’ was such a breakthrough in colour that it was used extensively to breed new cultivars, and so there was an explosion in new orange-cupped cultivars, which are very similar in colour and form, and therefore hard to distinguish and identify.” That leaves around seven thousand named varieties, of which the Donalds now have four hundred plus. “We began to spend a lot of time looking at derelict cottage gardens, and then to ask garden and estate owners for bulbs (mostly when visiting on Scotland’s Garden Scheme open days), and started to build up a reference collection—people were so often very generous,” says Kate. While visiting the Donalds, I stopped off at a graveyard with them in the old fishing village of Ullapool, but was relieved they left their spade in the car.
In 1990 the couple moved to Scotland, and as Duncan puts it, “The children got used to the Easter holidays being daffodil time and endless garden visits.” Scottish gardens have often preserved the past better than English ones, and with the climate being a good one for daffodils, they have proved a fruitful territory for tracking down long-forgotten varieties. As time has moved on, and the daffodils have grown, the Donalds are able to offer a number for sale—wide distribution is always a guarantee of survival. “We want to do for narcissus what Graham Stuart Thomas did for roses.”
One particular property, Threave in Dumfries and Galloway, has been a “Rosetta Stone” for them, says Duncan. The property had been owned by the Gordons, a family of Liverpool industrialists, who had used the castle as a summer residence. They had regularly bought bulbs over a long period and, crucially, kept good records. In the 1960s, a set of notes were made of the old head gardener’s knowledge, which included a sketch map of the woodland area indicating where old daffodil varieties were planted. The Donalds were then in an excellent position to identify daffodils growing in the garden; so far, they have named about ninety. A new breakthrough is in rescuing old varieties which were grown in Scilly as cut flowers, before the industry settled down to concentrate almost exclusively on Tazettas. This is going to be “now or never,” as so-called conservation measures are subsidising farmers to plough up old fields with their daffodils to plant them with wildflowers, and even to clear daffodils out of hedgerows. Kate is also trying to record something of the knowledge and expertise of Keith Low, a fisherman and semi-retired flower farmer, whose family has farmed in Scilly for generations. In 2012 she saved fifty-seven varieties from Scilly, although Keith reckons that some he remembers have been lost for good.
Over the years, the Donalds have worked out an effective methodology for identifying varieties in old gardens. They have systematically gone through old nursery catalogues, held by the RHS’s Lindley Library in London, and assembled a database mapping the availability of varieties over time. “The collections for sale in the catalogues are particularly valuable,” explains Duncan, “as these would have been bought in bulk and therefore most likely to still be around in gardens. [I]f a garden is known to have been planted up at a particular date or between two dates, then it is possible to go to the catalogue database, and see what was available, narrowing down the possibilities. [M]agazine articles (e.g., The Gardeners’ Chronicle) can be a useful source of information about when a particular garden was planted up if the garden itself has no record.” Gardens which do keep archives may sometimes contain invoices from nurseries or bulb dealers, listing varieties, or there may be old catalogues with names marked up. “Illustrations are the key,” says Kate. “It is impossible to name an old daffodil with any certainty if we cannot compare a specimen with two or three images from an old catalogue or plates in a gardening magazine.”
Daffodil grower Ron Scamp in his field of heirloom daffodils near Falmouth in Cornwall.
There is no doubting the rigour of the Donalds’ approach. The changes in names resulting from the way daffodil classification systems have worked over the years and duplications in naming have resulted in much confusion. “We are very careful,” says Duncan. “Every clump is mapped, and has an aluminium label with the name and accession number impressed onto it, and another label is buried wi
th the bulbs, which themselves go in an onion bag, so the roots can grow out but not the bulbs.” He goes on to explain that flowers are systematically photographed, at different angles, and at different times—as flowers can change in appearance considerably over the period in which they are in flower. The eventual aim, apart from making as many varieties available for sale as possible, is a field guide to old daffodils, which will enable anyone to identify old garden varieties.
‘Bath’s Flame’ (Engleheart, pre-1913) 1, an heirloom with the propellor-type petals typical of many late nineteenth-century varieties, now made commercially available again by both Ron Scamp and the Donalds. Kate and Duncan Donald’s croft 2 on the northwest coast of Scotland, home to a major collection of heirloom daffodils and a small nursery. Identifying daffodils requires much careful close examination, comparison of flower colours with the RHS colour chart, and reference to illustrations in old books 3–5.
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Gone Native
DAFFODIL COLONIES AND HOTSPOTS
Splashes of yellow in spring on roadsides or in hedges mark where someone once planted daffodils, or on the other hand perhaps abandoned them as garden refuse. Places with daffodils away from roads may indicate where once upon a time someone lived and gardened, the flowers coming up every year like a ghost, long after the timber of the house has rotted or the stones and bricks have been grown over. Throughout Britain and Ireland, and to a lesser extent, the United States and New Zealand, daffodils regularly survive over many decades.
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