Bring me sunshine
Wave goodbye to winter on a walk among the dancing daffodils.
“He that has two cakes of bread, let him sell one of them for some flowers of the narcissus, for bread is food for the body, but narcissus is food of the soul.” muhammed
It is a dull March day: sky grey, trees bare. Yet just over this brown hedge, there is a field full of yellow sunshine. the grass is bright with golden starbursts like a twinkling sea, but this isn’t sunlight: it’s a crowd of wild daffodils. they bob their heads together in the breeze, like the chuckling Martians in the smash potato advert gossiping about the strange human world. it’s a cheering sight.
Vell Mill Meadow lies near the Gloucestershire village of Dymock, in an area known as England’s Golden triangle for its buttery daffs. it has long drawn droves of visitors desperate to see this early sign of spring. in the 1930s Great Western Railway used to run Daffodil special trains from London to Dymock; coach trips were advertised in the newspapers. the local churches still put on Daffodil teas, and there’s an official trail devoted to the plant, the 10-mile Daffodil Way.
i’ll be joining the route later, but first i’m heading east to Ketford Bank. Here the blooms rake in colourful bunches up a steep slope as if they’ve been arranged by a florist at a market stall. it’s dazzling enough to make me squint. it is, of course, illegal to pick from the wild now, but in the 1930s tens of thousands of flowers were cut. some were sold, and some were sent to cheer up patients in London hospitals. in fact, the daffs were a crucial cash crop for many locals, filling the hungry gap before the summer harvest and apparently doing little harm to the bulbs.
Woodland twines along the hillside beyond and the flowers thin out among the mossy roots. it gives each one space to bob about and parade the beauty of its bloom and its narrow, greygreen leaves. Daffodils have long been prized by gardeners and
over 27,000 cultivars have been created over the years, with hybrids coloured every shade of custard, mustard, cream and orange, with little trumpets, big trumpets, double trumpets, double petals. Beautiful yes, but they are big, blowsy cousins – memorably described as ‘vegetable Tannoys’ by naturalist Stephen Moss – next to the dainty wild ones growing on this shadowy bank, where each lemon-peel-yellow trumpet is backed by a star of lemon-flesh-pale tepals.
Peer closely and you’ll see the trumpet, or corona, is narrow and looks quite the squeeze for a plump bumblebee. Some of the pollination is done by little beetles, working their way round the six dark chambers at the base of the trumpet – chambers which mean some people know it as the revolver plant. This daff’s official name is narcissus pseudonarcissus, after the hunter of Greek myth who pined away admiring his own reflection in a lake – and a yellow flower sprung up where he died.
Then it’s off across fields, through orchards and vineyards with views up to the Malvern Hills, to Betty Daw’s Wood. It’s the next renowned hotspot on this walk, but the wild daffs pop up everywhere hereabouts – along field edges, beside lanes, in churchyards, and even along the verge of the M50. They would once have been this common across much of the country. 16th-century botanist John Gerard described them as growing ‘almost everywhere through England’. They evaporated rapidly in the 19th century, as meadows were ploughed up, forests were turned to too-shady conifer plantations, and hedgerows were ripped out – which makes this profusion all the more exciting.
Daffodils are closely related to the snowdrop, the first flower of spring. But where that is a whisper the new season will come, the daffodil a few weeks later is a yodel it’s here and that ‘ Winter is dead’, as A. A. Milne put it in his poem Daffodowndilly. The sunny bloom has inspired a host of writers, from Gerard Manley Hopkins in his journal – ‘ The bright yellow corolla is seeded with very fine spangles which give it a glister and lie on a ribbing which makes it like cloth of gold’ – to Wordsworth wandering lonely
She wore her yellow sun-bonnet, She wore her greenest gown; She turned to the south wind And curtsied up and down. She turned to the sunlight And shook her yellow head, And whispered to her neighbor: “Winter is dead.” A. A.M ILNE, DAFFO DOWN DILLY
as a cloud in the poem Daffodils that we all remember from school (see panel). John Masefield, Poet Laureate from 1930 to 1967 hailed from nearby Ledbury and wrote of how ‘Daffodils glimmered underfoot’ on these flowery slopes.
In the years before World War I Dymock was home to a famous group of poets – you might have spotted you were on a trail called the Poets’ Path earlier. Lascelles Abercrombie arrived first in 1911, then Wilfred Gibson, Robert Frost, and Edward Thomas, with Rupert Brooke and John Drinkwater as visitors. They loved to walk freely over these green hills, but their wandering ways provoked suspicion and locals were known to call the police. In fact, Frost received a summons after an altercation with a gamekeeper intent on turfing them out of a wood.
But they adored this rural world, and its spring blooms too. Abercrombie, in Ryton Firs, wrote of the ‘daffodil-fires, Lying in pools on the loose dusky ground, Beneath the larches,’ and Wilfred Gibson remembered the flowers with nostalgia after the war that tore the world apart: ‘And still in Dymock fields the daffodils, Dance to the singing of the birds… In singing dreams of dancing gold, In days of old before the world went wrong.’
The path splits as you reach Betty Daw’s Wood, with two trails beckoning through the golden daffs. It’s just like Frost’s poem, The Road Not Taken: ‘ Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both… I took the one less traveled by.’ It’s probably the American poet’s most famous work, even though it’s meaning is ‘tricky’. It seems like a nudge to venture onto the path less trodden, but Frost explained it was actually ‘a mild satire on the chronic vacillating habits of Edward Thomas’.
Biographer, Lawrance Thompson, explains: ‘Frost frequently took long walks with Thomas through the countryside. Repeatedly Thomas would choose a route which might enable him to show his American friend a rare plant or vista; but it often happened that before the end of such a walk Thomas would regret the choice he had made and would sigh over what he might have shown Frost if they had taken a ‘ better’ direction.’
It’s easy to sympathise with Thomas. Both paths through this wood – and the web of trails through Greenaway’s Wood, Shaw Common, Oxenhall and Dymock Woods beyond – look so enticing. Is that one brighter with daffodils? Or that one? They’re all beautiful and Frost’s lesson was to enjoy the one you choose. Perhaps the most luminous gold of all lies in two old-time orchards known as Gwen and Vera’s fields, where the flowers mosh in merry crowds beneath the silvered trunks of apple trees.
In Dymock Wood I pick up the official Daffodil Way back to the village, with the blooms edging the fields as they line routes around the world. The wild daff is native to Western Europe, and spreads by bulb division and seed – and by human fascination. ‘They flash their beauty at us and they exploit our sensory pleasure in their flowers and their scent,’ Dr Fleur Rothschild explained on Radio 4. ‘ When botanists are mapping the distribution of daffodils there is a really suggestive spread... along such ancient trade routes as the Silk Route. Even pilgrims on their way to Santiago de Compostela were picking up the odd bulb and giving them as gifts or as specimens for study to botanists. It’s not so much a yellow-brick road, but a yellow-bulb road.’ A yellow-bulb road that here in Gloucestershire walks you straight into spring.
“A daffodil pushing up through the dark earth to the spring, knowing somehow deep in its roots that spring and light and sunshine will come, has more courage and more knowledge of the value of life than any human being I’ve met.” Made le in el’ eng le