THE thrill OF DAFFODILS

If you want drifts of daffs glinting in your garden in spring, follow Monty Don’s tips for how to choose and care for them

This has – so far – been a tremendously good year for daffodils. But is there ever a bad year for them? Well, daffodils, like any other plant, react to weather, climate and growing conditions from year to year, and this year they all seem to have come together to produce ideal flowering conditions.

The daffodil season in my garden is long. The first little wild daffs in the orchard, Narcissus pseudonarcissus, appear before the end of February and remain at their very best until the end of March. The colder the weather, the longer they last, but for all their daintiness they are tough and will withstand snow, ice, wind and rain. These are definitely flowers for growing in grass rather than a border or a container, and their natural habitat is in dappled shade at the edge of woodland where they spill into surrounding fields.

There are plenty of other small, even miniature daffodils to grow that are ideal for containers. I like ‘Minnow’, ‘Hawera’ and ‘Pipit’ – all three are now looking good in terracotta pots on the table outside my potting shed and I use the lovely golden ‘Tête-à-tête’ in pots in our various sitting areas.

There is a huge range of daffodils to choose from. At last count there were more than 50 different species and around 13,000 different cultivars (meaning varieties that are deliberately bred rather than occurring naturally, made by conflating the words ‘cultivated’ and ‘variety’). Their flowering forms can range from the simple hanging trumpet with downturned petals to the crazy dandelion starburst of N. ‘Rip van Winkle’. I have ‘Thalia’, which grows by the hundreds in my Writing Garden and is white with a lovely cream trumpet, whereas there are quite a few varieties with deep orange trumpets and deep yellow petals.

Daffodils can be highly scented. There are many of these to choose from but I’m very fond of ‘Actaea’ and ‘Geranium’, both of which have delicate yellow trumpets and white petals and are long-lasting in the ground or in a vase. When you cut daffodils they’ll last longer if you leave the stems in shallow, tepid water for a couple of hours in a dark room before arranging them.

No matter which of the many cultivars of daffodil you grow, certain basic techniques are required for all of them if they are to flower and thrive. The first is to plant early and deep – ideally in September and preferably no later than the end of October. Aim to plant at twice the depth of the bulb. This will result in longer, stronger stems and will mean they are less likely to dry out. Water the bulbs well in autumn even though you cannot see them yet because this is when they start to grow. Do not, however, let them become sodden. Good drainage is essential. One of the biggest causes of daffodils being ‘blind’ – i.e. growing foliage but no flower stems – is lack of moisture in autumn.

Never cut the foliage back but let it die down naturally. This will take at least two months after flowering, so if you’re planting into grass, accept that the grass around them will need to be unmown until the middle of June at the earliest. If you’re growing daffodils in containers, remove the seed heads because this takes energy from the developing bulb that contains next year’s flowers. However, in grass they will spread by seed, so leave them on.

If you find that established daffodils growing in grass are becoming increasingly blind, they may well need dividing. Lift the clumps either immediately after flowering or in September, divide them and replant, watering them in well.

Monty with Nellie and some of his daffodils