The Daffodils are out already!

I have recorded the first emergence of Daffodil on 16 occasions and this year’s flowering is one of the earlier dates, having witnessed a variety in flower on 2nd January 2012. My range of dates covers the 1st December through to the 2nd March with the mean being 29th January.

Welsh Daffodils, courtesy of wikipedia
Wild Daffodil (Narcissus pseudonarcissus) courtesy of Natural History Museum - http://www.nhm.ac.uk/index.html
Wild Daffodil (Narcissus pseudonarcissus) courtesy of Natural History Museum
 

Daffodil – Narcissus (plant)

Daffodils come in a variety of shapes and sizes and colours. The parts of the flower known as the perianth and corona can differ in colouration or equally contain the same pigments. They bloom in a variety of yellows, whites, oranges, pinks, reds or even greens.

Known by various vernacular names such as Daffys, Lent Lily’s, Easter lily’s, the true Wild Daffodil (Narcissus pseudonarcissus) often flowers between the months of March and April. Because of this, they are often associated with Mothering Sunday and Palm Sunday. I personally, have records of the Wild Daffodil in bloom on an average date of 9th March and there are particular woods in the United Kingdom where only the wild variety grow. However, these places are getting rarer, due to the destruction of their ancient woodland sites. Dependent on where you are located within the UK, some  varieties of Narcissi bloom as early as late November.

Farmers and landowners once harvested wild Narcissuses to provide them with a welcome additional income. As with others in the plant kingdom, there have been occasions of poisoning where children had mistakenly eaten Daffodil bulbs, believing them to be onions.  

Kind Regards

Tony Powell

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

4 thoughts on “The Daffodils are out already!

Add yours

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

A WordPress.com Website.

Up ↑

%d bloggers like this: