Meet the golden girls
These cheerful cups and trumpets are cherished by early pollinators
There’s one daffodil you can rely on to flower early in the year and it’s a bright-yellow, foot-high trumpet daffodil ‘Rijnveld’s Early Sensation’. Although named after a Dutch bulb seller, it’s a 1940s’ British-bred cultivar. It only became well-known in the early 1990s and it was expensive and hard to find back then. Now it’s affordable and readily available and you only need one or two clumps in a sheltered spot to bring spring one step nearer.
Most other early flowering narcissi are shorter, and the 15cm (6in) ‘Tête-à-tête’, carrying two ‘head-tohead’ flowers per stem, was also raised in the 1940s by Cornish cut flower grower Alec Gray. Although only 15-20cm (6-8in) high, commercially it’s still the most widely grown daffodil because it’s so versatile in pot or ground.
‘February Gold’, bred before 1923, has daintier flowers and the slender trumpet and swept-back petals are an indication of its N. cyclamineus bloodline. Other, slightly later-flowering options include cream and pale-yellow ‘Sailboat’, the long-trumpeted yellow ‘Mite’ and two narcissi bearing orange centres – ‘Martinette’ and ‘Jetfire’. The earliest yellow flower is often winter aconite (Eranthis hyemalis), which requires careful placing because its raisin-like tubers hate being baked by summer sun and need good winter drainage. Many of the most successful colonies are shaded by trees but, if the trees are pollarded, summer sun reaches the ground and the colony diminishes quickly.
You can either plant winter aconite tubers in autumn, or buy them in-the-green in March or April. Give them a spot that’s cool in summer and well-drained in winter. The pale-brown seeds are ripe once the star-shaped capsule begins to split. Sprinkle them, or leave them to their own devices. Some named winter aconites are sterile, so have no seeds, but you can break up and replant the small tubers when they’re dormant.
Crocuses also come in yellow, and smaller-flowered types bloom a good four weeks before the giants. Smaller ones include vivid yellow C. korolkowii ‘January Gold’, which needs good drainage; ‘Advance’ is a purplebacked egg-yolk yellow; C. lutea ‘Golden Yellow’ has brown-streaked outer petals; and ‘Gipsy Girl’ bears bolder purple stripes. They all need a well-drained warm spot and protection from mice and voles.
Smaller-flowered yellow crocuses bloom a good four weeks before the giants