26th April

The crystalline purity of the Old Pheasants eye narcissus is matchless. Of all spring bulbs this ranks very high. Not only do they have an ethereal beauty in a class of its own, they have a particularly distilled daffodil scent. This arrives on the hastening wave of spring; with the first sunning of bare earth; the first rain after the sucked dry end of winter; a new veering in the wind; the rising young grass in which they throng; larch and poplar leafing. Laundry white, on sight they would make any heart light. Laundry clean on smelling they deliver water, honey, apricots and a wisp of something more robust, musk perhaps. This strength gives them mystery as well as charm. They have been found in the funeral wreaths of the Egyptians. The power of the scent is reflected in the name, the ‘nar’ part has the same derivation as narcotic – a flower with a scent that causes numb lethargy. They rarely perfume the air outside, it being too cold, but when brought into the house, like their ‘Paperwhite’ cousins at Christmas, they puff a festive note about the house, rounded and confident. In the still uncertain, spring-blown garden they must be sought out and picked, stems oozing, then pressed, coolly watered, to the face to experience one of life’s deep pleasures. Vita Sackville West describes the moment when the straight n. poeticus begin to flower, around the equinox, when the “grass beneath the Worcester Pearmain blows with narcissus” “all in a hurry in the wind of March”. She remarks on their generosity producing ‘two score’ progeny where you planted one. They look incredible under white flowering cherry trees.

Narcissi are mentioned in Homer and Theophrastus in 300bc. Probably grown in England since Roman times, they have countless, delightful common names including ‘Sweet Nancies’ and ‘Non-so –Pretty’. They turn up in Chaucer and Spencer, Henry Lyte calls them ‘primrose pyerles’ and when Shakespeare writes of the narcissi that‘…May had painted with his soft showers’ one thinks of the orchards of middle England. There are wildings found in Japan, and in Chinese paintings a double, but best for wild colonies are Spain, Portugal and North Africa. In the high Pyrenees, even as late as July, there can be meadow full of very lovely, narrow twisted petalled Narcissus poeticus var. ‘Recurvus’. The leaves however are poisonous to cattle. Narcissus poeticus var. ‘Recurvus’ – an early 19thcentury strain, the ‘Old Pheasant’s Eye’ is late and lovely. In the middle of the nineteenth century, Dean Herbert ‘Crossed a Trumpet with a Poet’ in order to prove that wild narcissi might actually be hybrids. Thereafter breeding of yellow daffodils got out of hand. Bowles laments that breeding is ‘degrading daffodils’ as early as the 1890’s. But of n. poeticus he says that they were traditionally called incomparable, ‘Nonpareille’ and ‘Nonsuch’, and they remain so. Their porcelain perfection is captured by Margery Fish thus; “their petals have… the same glittering quality found in nerines and begonias, as if each cell were encased with lenses to reflect light.”

this “Rockii” tree peony looks like it is going to be sensational in a weeks time…

Monday, April 27, 2009