Daffodils, One to Ten Thousand

 

In the Ouchitas

 

            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

The Forsythia Saga

 

 

Around these parts spring made a dramatic start, but quickly retreated into a protracted period of cool and damp, by no means a serious threat of a return to winter, but far from an invitation to cheerful outdoor activity.  So far as the enjoyment of spring’s arrival is concerned,  meteorological circumstances have thus cooperated with the severe constraints imposed by the coronavirus pandemic to mute, to some degree, the impact of what is ordinarily a boisterous annual experience.  Many flowering trees are in bloom.  Some, indeed, are already beginning to go over.  But as I barely go out in the town, what I have actually seen has been limited to my local walks.  Most of these do include lovely greening woods and waterside paths along the lake front or the canal tow-paths.  Here one does see a few flowering trees, including some tall and spreading ornamental cherries, but there are no architect-designed pleached floral alleys as there are in places on the campus and the center of the town.  Under these circumstances, I have gained a renewed admiration for simple old standbys—I’ll call them simply the yellows—that never let you down.

 

            The first of these are the daffodils.  Every year they are magnificent, but this year more than ever.  The daffodil is dear to my heart for many reasons.  Nature is full of ugly ducklings, but the transformation of  a wrinkled oniony thing that looks like a cold scrotum into a delicate and magnificent yellow bloom is, so far as I am concerned, better than the ontological argument for the existence of God.  Furthermore, with even a minimal attention to care in planting, the daffodil will multiply, it will naturalize, just become a faithful and comfortable part of the scene, asking little of you while offering so very much.  Best of all, if you should happen to be outnumbered by deer in your neighborhood by a ratio of ten to one, it may well be the only thing you plant that you can be pretty sure will not become a few molecules of a venison haunch before it can get three inches high.  Finally, even more than the red, red rose, it must be any English professor’s favorite flower.  Poetry is so endangered in this country that I sometimes think there are more people who write it than who read it.  But you generally count on people—at least most pre-millennials—vaguely remembering their Wordsworth as he himself so vividly remembered the waving oceans of yellow flowers.  “They flash upon that inward eye / which is the bliss of solitude, / and then my heart with pleasure fills / and dances with the daffodils.”

 

 

            But the yellow spring flower that I would perhaps praise even more highly is yet more humble and more commonplace: forsythia.  The tiny flashes of yellow along the luxuriant green bushy stems are often the very first indications of spring’s arrival.  This year the yellow glints were showing out under the snow.  I think that only the snow drops were earlier, and white against white does not make what you would call a vivid display.  Daffodils are fairly easy to deal with.  Forsythia is almost impossible to kill—and I speak as a gardener who has proved his ability to kill anything.  If you cut off a length of forsythia branch and push the cut end into the earth and abandon it, there is a fifty percent chance that it will root and thrive.  If you put a few grains of grafting hormone on to it, the chances approach ninety-five percent.  Along the main road leading from Route 1 into the town of Princeton there is a stretch of still mainly open land belonging to the university, perhaps half a mile long,  For nearly half of that distance there is on one side of the road a gorgeous forsythia hedge from which I have, over the years, taken probably as many as a hundred cuttings.  Since the mass of brilliant yellow on the forsythia bushes comes and goes within a month, it is most fortunate that the lush green of the abundant leaves makes the forsythia an attractive edging plant at all seasons of the year.

 

 

            Quite a few words in the English language derive from the names of actual people, and many of them are somewhat disquieting.  One does not want to fall victim to Lynch law, contract Parkinson’s disease, or fail a  Wassermann test.  What we might call the linguistic Overton window continues to open ever wider so as to allow of Reaganomics and such.  Some very great ones lend their names to new-found stars.  But the highest achievement of all, to my mind would be to have a flower bearing your name.  Look at the bright blossoms (bracts, actually) of the bougainvillea vine, named of course after Louis Antoine de Bougainville, the Gallic Captain Cook.  You practically hear the lapping of the waves below the gunnels, or catch a mental glimpse of Gaugin’s Tahitian woman in the red skirt.

 

            The name forsythia honors the memory of William Forsyth (1737-1804), one of several great British gardeners of the classic period.  Forsyth is not perhaps as famous as the two Tradescants (>tradescantia) of two centuries earlier; but he was a man of parts who played an important role in the histories both of botanic medicines and of garden architecture.  He was born into proletarian obscurity in Oldmeldrum in Aberdeenshire, an out-of-the-way place that, oddly enough, I actually visited in the late 1950s.  The countryside in that northern blade of Scotland is magnificent in a rugged sort of a way, and I remember it as feeling very remote.  It probably would have seemed a good deal more so in 1737, when Forsyth appeared on the scene.  He made his way to London in the 1760s, where he eventually took charge of the Apothecaries’ Garden in Chelsea and later of the royal gardens of Saint James and Kensington.  He is credited with constructing the first English rock garden, using (among other randomly gathered stones) plaques of lava fetched from Iceland.  He deserves his halo of brilliant yellow blossom.

 

In Search of Saint James--and Tomatoes

My Easter boutonnière, still going strong

The last day of March witnessed the last meeting of our Evergreen Forum seminar on the General Prologue of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.  The initial phrase of the poem’s famous opening (“Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote…”) introduces a sentence of which the principal clause, appearing only eleven lines later, is “then longen folk to goon on pilgrimages.”  That is, when the April showers arrive, people get itchy to go on pilgrimage.  By strange happenstance, this statement is as applicable this year in twenty-first-century New Jersey as it was in fourteenth-century Kent.  For we are indeed just about to leave, in ten days' time, to lead a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in Spain, under the sponsorship of the Princeton University Alumni Council.  I shall attempt to “live blog” this event at it progresses, though with what success I am reluctant to predict.

            What Chaucer more fully says is “When April’s sweet showers pierce to the root the drought of March…”  Observant students, of whom there are many in the Evergreen Forum, with most among them having visited England, wondered what “drought” Chaucer could possibly have had in mind.  At Bodiam weather station, quite near the pilgrims’ route, the annual average rainfall over two recent decades was approximately thirty-four inches, with about two-and-a-half of that falling in March.  The explanation is that Chaucer is of course speaking in a figurative or allegorical fashion.  The drought of March is the lean and penitential season of Lent, which comes to an end with the festival abundance of Easter.  Once again this year’s calendar was cooperative, with Easter falling last Sunday, April 5.  My son Luke and I were together at the stunning Easter Vigil Eucharist in the chancel of the University chapel, as we have been for so many of the last thirty Easters, starting in deep darkness at five o’clock and moving slowly toward the burst of light that comes when full sunlight finally hits the great east “Resurrection” window toward seven.

          

            But New Jersey’s calendar and its meteorology were not so well synchronized this year.  I like to wear a daffodil boutonnière on Easter.  There has been no March drought here, but the moisture came in a form guaranteed initially to retard rather than to hasten the appearance of the tendre croppes.  We had perhaps twenty inches of snow just last month, with protracted low temperatures.  As March surrendered to April there were no daffodils in sight.   By Easter eve the house was surrounded by incipient yellow buds, and among them I was luckily able to find one (though only one) beginning to open.  Now, three days later, many more have appeared.

            Daffodils are gorgeous, but even the nearly omnivorous deer (a large herd of which hangs out in my extended back yard) refuse to eat them.  Everyone knows that the signature garden crop of the Garden State is the Jersey tomato.  My tomato farming has been hampered by our unfortunate tendency to spend a central month of the growing season in Paris or somewhere else nifty, but even so I had good results last summer with a little, partially shaded plot at the front of the house.

 the old garden plot

            My appetite thus whetted, and under the inspiration of Chaucer, I determined to create a somewhat larger bed in full sun just south of the stone wall I put up around my property.   This is at the edge of a large common meadow formerly known as the “Baseball Field”—an appellation dating from the 'Sixties, when there were still many young people in the neighborhood.  This had to be wrested from a bramble patch overrun with various formidable jungle vines, especially coarse wild roses and the voracious species of Virginia Creeper that grows a foot or more per week and feeds from stubborn fat tuberous roots with the tensile strength of Kevlar. This horror must be entirely dug out and destroyed if you hope for anything else to grow in its former domain. 

 the new garden plot

            Even if you lack commercial earth-moving equipment it is possible, barely, to achieve one’s goal.  Some years ago in upstate New York I found in a dump a heavily framed iron grid, roughly three feet by four.  Its original function is uncertain to me, but I was able to adapt it as a heavy-duty sieve in attacking the hideous root structure of this vine.  The price of achieving a plot of Jersey topsoil suitable for producing the Jersey tomato is to dig down at least a foot and sieve every shovelful of the results, removing all brick bats, animal bones, small stones, Mason jar shards, and, especially, the tuber clusters and root fragments.  This activity is not for the faint of heart, the weak of back, or the subtle of brain.

one spadeful at a time

            So far, I am on schedule.  The next task, which I must accomplish pre-pilgrimage, is to get adequate fencing around both the old and the new beds—unless my ambition can be satisfied by offering a dietary supplement to the deer.  Then if I can get plants in the ground soon after returning from Europe, there will be some hope of having a tomato or two in September!

Wordsworth Vindaloo

"Ten thousand saw I at a glance"

Last week I revealed to my readers some of the many exalted positions I occupy, and this week I announce another: I am a Co-Chair of the Grounds Committee of the Gray Farm Neighbors Association. The residents of our lakeside tract in Princeton Township share ownership of ten or fifteen acres of meadows and woodland. For the Grounds Committee the main tasks in tending the Common Ground are beating back the jungle and cleaning up storm damage, but we strive also to do some actual landscaping. In its third year, my scheme of mass bulb planting has begun to pay off, and in particular we have a spectacular show of daffodils and narcissi along the paths next to the lake.

Daffodils above Ullswater

Unfortunately I can show you no photograph, for blog day has arrived precipitate in a double sense. It hardly matters, though, since you can capture the essence of the scene perfectly by looking at the most famous water-side daffodils in the world, those above Ullswater in the Lake District in England. The divine Creator gave them their beauty in time immemorial; William Wordsworth gave them their fame in 1804 with the following poem.

I WANDER'D 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, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the Milky Way,
They stretch'd in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed -- and gazed -- but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

Anybody who reads poems at all has probably read this one. It is justly famous, despite some pretty awful lines, such as

I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought. 

In chasing a pedestrian rhyme Wordsworth leaves huge, muddy bootprints all over the natural syntax of the English language, completely abandoning, incidentally, the noble theory he and Coleridge laid out in the “Preface” to the Lyrical Ballads: “The Poet thinks and feels in the spirit of human passions. How, then, can his language differ in any material degree from that of all other men who feel vividly and see clearly?” Well, by the verb to the end of the sentence artificially postponing, that’s how. Still, the inward eye…the bliss of solitude is pure gold, like the daffodils themselves.

The line that makes the poem unteachable today, though, is not Wordsworth’s fault:

A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company

This now elicits titters or guffaws. But the sexual meaning of gay, today nearly universal, is a mysterious neologism. Wordsworth had never heard of it. It is furthermore incoherent. If homosexuality is gay, heterosexuality should be morose. Instead, oddly, it is straight, in which case…

But I learned long ago, in my very first job, that the Romantic Poets were unlikely to survive modern undergraduate sexual obsessions. The moment of truth came in 1963 at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, in a freshman literature survey populated largely by fresh-faced, blue-eyed, blond-haired young women called Karen, from someplace called Fond du Lac.

We read Wordsworth’s “Lucy” poems, and I assigned a short paper on one of the best known of them, “Strange Fits of Passion Have I Known”. In this poem the poet-lover sees his girlfriend’s house by moonlight and has the irrational apprehension (“strange fit of passion”, indeed) that she might lie dead within it. As the rider passes the house, the moon sank low upon it.

And now we reached the orchard-plot;
And, as we climbed the hill,
The sinking moon to Lucy's cot
Came near, and nearer still. 

Well, I was home one Saturday night grading papers, just beginning to nod, when I came to one that made the hair on the back of my neck stiffen. One of the fresh-faced Karens from Fond du Lac had written a psycho-sexual interpretation of the poem that probably deserved an X-rating but might have squeaked through with a strong Parental Guidance Advisory. For both Wordsworth and Karen had been victimized by philological vagaries over which they had no control.

cots

There was a perfectly good Old English word cot, meaning a modest house, a humble dwelling. Eventually it was replaced by cottage, but it survived well into the nineteenth century and survives still in various place names and compounds such as dovecote. Meanwhile there had been a distantly related old Sanskrit root *khatva, generally suggesting narrowness or constriction, which in a later Prakrit became khat, meaning a most useful piece of portable furniture so characterized—to wit, a camp-bed or cot. The Brits brought back this useful thing, and the useful word denoting it, along with other Indian treasures such as umbrellas and Darjeeling tea. Gradually the Indian homophone hogged the whole space formerly occupied by the Old English word.

 Karen (from Fond du Lac)

For Wordsworth the cot was his girlfriend’s little house, viewed distantly as a dark exterior--and nothing more. And why should Karen from Fond du Lac think that the cot was anything else than, well, a cot. I have to admit that it definitely spices up a rather lugubrious poem if you think that it is all taking place in bed—sort of Wordsworth Vindaloo.

 William Wordsworth (from the Lake District)


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SEMI-SUNSHINE ADDENDUM  3PM ET 20 April 2011

Some weak sunshine has appeared, allowing me to give an impression of what this post was supposed to be about--the show of daffodils on the Gray Farm paths above Carnegieswater.