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Daffodils celebrated at Brookside Gardens
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Bravure daffodil
All Photos: Tom Taylor
The lingering cool weather has prolonged and also delayed the season of narcissus, the genus we love to call daffodils. Pert and always puckered up, ready to blow their horns, and “tossing their heads in sprightly dance” as William Wordsworth penned, these stalwarts of gardens and hillsides will be celebrated April 11 & 12 at Brookside Gardens. Sponsored by the Washington Daffodil Society, the Mid-Atlantic Regional Daffodil Show brings out a goodly selection but by no means all, of the some 20,000 types of daffodils, according the the show chairman, Tom Taylor.
“The flowers are not shown ‘in the green’” explained Mr. Taylor, “they are shown in water. The problem this year has been some varieties are late blooming because of the weather and this makes it difficult to determine just what we will be in the competitions.”
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Spirot daffodil
On his quarter acre lot, Mr. Taylor grows over three hundred varieties having started almost twenty years ago when a neighbor gave him some bulbs and the next year encouraged him to participate in showing them.
Natives of the Mediterranean on the Iberian Peninsula and North Africa, these members of the Amaryllis family are being hybridized so the brilliant yellows we normally think of as the standard, are now giving way to pinks, oranges, multiple flowers on a stem and some with the perianth flexed back inside of around the trumpet making them looking like Thelma’s hair blowing with the top down.
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Cyclamineus daffodil
More classic is Wordsworth’s reflection on daffodils that closed,
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.
The show is free. Hours: Saturday, April 11, 2pm-5pm; Sunday April 12, 9am - 4pm
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