In the third book of his Metamorphoses Ovid tells the tragic story of Echo, scorned by a beautiful but self-absorbed young man who, enamored as he stared into a sylvan pool, had no desire but for his own reflected image. In this fit of erotic psychopathy he died. Ovid says that his sisters, the Naiads and the wood nymphs, the Dryads, “were preparing the funeral pyre, the quivering torches and the bier, but there was no body. Instead of his body they came upon a flower with white petals surrounding a yellow heart.” Metamorphosis is a fancy word for “change”, and Ovid’s poem is a huge anthology of stories about human bodies changed into something else—flowers actually being one of the happier options. This fellow’s name, of course, was Narcissus. From this mythological name we now have, in the realms of medicine and popular psychology, the condition of extreme self-absorption called Narcissism. In one of the most widely read poems of medieval Europe, the Romance of the Rose, Narcissus appears as a monitory reminder of the fatal powers of erotic passion. There can often be a confusion between the scientific and the popular names of plants. To botanists narcissus denotes a genus with more than sixty species of spring flowers, only some of which are called narcissi by gardeners. In general, what we call daffodils are all yellow. Certainly for my own plantings I prefer the more numerous all yellow blooms. Call me a classicist.
Narcissus
Mythological and literary connections augment my love of the daffodil, which is my favorite flower for reasons both aesthetic and practical. To begin with the practical, the daffodil has the great advantage of being unpalatable to deer. Tulips, on the other hand, seem to be the caviar of our cloven-footed friends. That reason might be enough on its own because it means that we actually have some chance of seeing spring color in the yard. Practically all my other horticultural efforts, floral or vegetable, are frustrated by a small menagerie of quadrupeds that live on or circle our grounds. But daffodils are safe from animal consumption, pretty easy to deal with, and pretty forgiving of indolence and incompetence. They are very faithful and very steady, quietly spreading and multiplying. The appearance of the daffodils each year is also one of the most reliable indications of the arrival of real spring. In recent years the early spring weather has been variable in temperature. A warm week, which brings out a brave showing of bright daffodils, can be followed by a lengthy cold period. But unless it gets extremely cold, these circumstances only extend the life of the spring flowers. It really is quite marvelous. This year we had a good showing by Palm Sunday, with the appropriate climax appearing just at Easter a week later. Just now an unusually warm week—temperatures in the 80s!—has pushed the flowers over the top and into decline. The daffodil plays out the allegory of human life, all too soon displaying its mortality in the traces of its fading beauty. But there is another allegory too, for there is always a fresh one for my lapel button hole at the Easter Vigil. There can be no backsliding from spring now. We must prepare for some months of heavy jungle green. In particular I must prepare, if I am possibly up to it, for the annual battle of the bamboo.
We have some of our daffodils in what might be called (generously) beds, but the gods intended them to grow wild. The process of returning a bag of bulbs to the wild is called “naturalizing.” In earlier years I have written a little about my own efforts to naturalize bulbs on the common ground of our neighborhood, called the Gray Farm, and at the beautiful rural property of our son Richard and his wife Katie Dixon up on the Delaware near Frenchtown. Both of those naturalization projects are still works in progress, but they are very satisfying so far.
Large fields of daffodils allowed to go (or stay) native can inspire awe. They are to be found in many parts of the country, including my home state of Arkansas, where there are some much admired ones. But the most famous daffodils fields on earth, I presume, must be those in the Lake District in England. The person most responsible for their fame is the poet William Wordsworth. Anyone who knows his poetry at all is likely to know the lyric “I wandered lonely as a cloud…” 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 golden daffodils/beside the lake—the lake of course being Ullswater, one of the two larger lakes in the “Lake District” of today’s Cumbria.
Poets are usually afforded what is called poetic license, so I will cut Wordsworth a little slack. If I am correct, I am writing this little essay exactly two hundred and twenty-one years to the day after the actual experience being described. On that day, most fortunately, he was not quite so lonely as a cloud. His walking companion was his formidable sister Dorothy, the keeper of a journal that is itself a little treasure of English literature. Here is what she had to say of that day: “I never saw daffodils so beautiful. They grew among mossy stones….Some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness, and the rest tossed, and reeled, and danced and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the lake, they looked so gay, ever glancing, ever changing. The wind blew directly over the lake to them. There was here and there a little knot and a few stragglers a few yards higher up, but they were so few as not to disturb the simplicity and unity and life of that one busy highway.” The daffodil walk took place on April 15, 1802. The poet wrote two versions of his experience, both of them quite some time later. It is clear that both texts must have relied on the actual words of Dorothy’s journal. It is fitting that one of the poem’s finer images is that of dancing daffodils. At a stretch you might call the poem itself a kind of collaborative dance.
Turner, "Ullswater"
Of course as we can learn from Turner, Ullswater is quintessentially “picturesque” with or without daffodils. I visited the Lake District in, I think 1959, though not in the spring flowering season. I did see some daffodil greens—but ten thousand? I doubt it. I came much closer once in an Ozark meadow.
wild meadow in Arkansas
