At last, after months of waiting, the spring-heralding Daffodils (genus Narcissus) are beginning to open! The first small spear like shoots started to appear long before the bitter December winter weather and have survived and prospered against the coldest of odds!
Some say that spring officially starts at the beginning of March, while others insist it begins around the 22nd (vernal equinox, when day and night are of equal length). Do we really care as long as it eventually gets here? It seems somewhat callous to be considering the prospects of this year's garden with so much upheaval taking place around the world, but at the same time the tragedies of our counterparts in other areas of the world certainly makes me count my blessings, and wonder if it isn’t time to withdraw what bit of savings I might have and blow it all on something outrageously frivolous before it comes to my turn. (Although, being on the miserly side, I can’t see that actually happening!)
But, seriously, how do you pick yourself up and carry on day to day living when everything you own, and in many cases, loved ones and friends have been destroyed by the ravages of the monumental forces of nature, and in some cases by the thoughtlessness and greed of our fellow man? I can’t imagine the grief and hopelessness people in these circumstances must feel. And, yet, people do, against all odds, like the daffodil shoots, bounce back! Our sympathies are surely with them all.
‘Daffy-down-Dilly
Has come to town
With a yellow petticoat
And a pretty green gown...’
The old nursery rhyme certainly sums up the Daffodil or Narcissus, a bulbous plant which has been with us for thousands of years. The Romans first brought them to Britain, and very thankful we are too! Imagine a spring without them!
The botanist Parkinson, in 1628 said, ‘Of daffodils there are almost a hundred sorts...’ He would be amazed if he were alive today by the approximated 25,000 varieties! Although I have a few in my garden I obviously have a long way to go!
Daffs were developed in the days when most plants were used for either their culinary or medicinal properties. The whole plant being of a toxic nature they contributed to neither so were lucky to be given garden room, although now the galanthine, which they contain, is sometimes used to treat Alzheimer’s.
The amazingly sunny flower is the National flower of Wales and a symbol of Marie Curie Cancer Care in the UK.
Miniature varieties can be as small as seven centimetres (or two and a half inches in old money!). The tallest, according to the Guinness Book of Records, measured 1.55m (5 feet 1 inch) on the Isle of Wight in 1979! The March winds would certainly have played havoc with that one!!
The daffodil was first written about in 300BC, but one of the most well known of the scribblings about the Narcissus must surely be the poem by William Wordsworth (1770-1850) simply titled The Daffodils . A.E.Housman in his collection of poems A Shropshire Lad , (1887), also wrote about ‘A jonquil, not a Grecian lad.’
A couple of superstitions concerning this glorious flower of spring are:
· If you discover the first Daffodil of spring you will have more gold than silver that year!
· And it’s unlucky to bring Daffodils into the house before the goslings have hatched!
Neither of which are going to make a noticeable difference to my life with little prospect of receiving much in the way of gold or silver, and possessing no geese the likelihood of goslings hatching is positively nil!
And I can’t leave you without mentioning Narcissism, which is a noun meaning excessive interest in oneself (and we all know a few of those!!) from the Greek Narkissos, son of the river god Kephissos, who fell in love with his own reflection in a pool and eventually wasted away. But luckily for us, the gods took pity on him and changed him into a flower of the same name!
Thanks for your time. Take care. Speak soon.
The Bumpkin Rambler xx
