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Oxfordprospect |
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6 April 2011
A look at Spring in Oxford
"Daffodil Time. "
By: Julia Gasper I sometimes think that if we had to have only one flower in the whole year - a sort of Desert Island flower - it would have to be the daffodil. Nothing else quite so joyously announces that Spring has come around again. This year I have been noticing how the fancy varieties of daffodil are getting more and more predominant until you can hardly find any of the ordinary, old-fashioned, plain ones, by which I mean yellow daffodils, with a trumpet in the middle, and just a single, not a double flower. There are every other possible kind to be seen - many of them white, which are all very well for contrast now and then, but not really as cheerful as the familiar golden daffodil of childhood memory. There are white daffodils with a yellow middle, or a flat orange middle, looking like a fried egg, and there are those fussy little white narcissi, with several heads on one stalk. I have even seen some so-called daffodils that look like chrysanthemums, with spiky petals sticking out in all directions - whatever is the point of that? There is something to be said for the frilly white daffodils, which look like a choirboy’s collar, but I am not really in favour of the double ones. These days it seems there are more double daffodils than singles. Yellow doubles with a waffly bit in the centre, creamy-white doubles with a touch of lemon in the centre, they all have one terrible drawback, which is the tendency to fall over. When it comes to daffodils, as so many other things, nature knows best. The ordinary single-petalled daffodil is much more likely to stay upright and dance in the breeze because it is not too heavy for its stem. Spring time is windy. Lately we have had gales. Daffodils that have crashed nose-down on the ground or worse, bent their own stems, do not really grace any garden. Why be greedy? The single star of petals is enough. Less is more. More is less. Whereas once the trend was always to make flowers bigger and bigger, now we have a fashion for miniatures. Miniatures daffodils, like Tête-à-tête, can be delightful, especially in pots, and they are more like the original wild flowers that Wordsworth saw, but they cannot be so successfully combined with grape hyacinths or forget-me-nots unless you have got dwarf varieties of every flower. The miniatures will just disappear. There are some classic designs that really are impossible to beat. The bicycle with two large, equal-sized wheels. The Cartier tank watch. The Panama hat. For me, the familiar golden, single-petalled daffodil, about twelve inches tall, is in that class and I can never plant enough of them. Julia Gasper. |
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