Plan for a dazzling daff display

Plan carefully and you can enjoy their cheery yellow flowers for months

Once Christmas is over I begin to get twitchy and start hankering to see daffodils in the garden. I know they’re on the way because my clump of early snowdrops ( Galanthus elwesii) flowered as usual a few days before Christmas and the aconites are showing colour.

I wander around the garden every day, come rain or shine, looking for those spiky leaves breaking the surface of the soil.

This year, however, I’ve a bonus because all the fields around the house have reached the point in the rotation when they’re planted with daffodils. We plant our commercial stocks in the same field only once every eight years. As I dress in the morning I can look down on the field with more than 400 varieties, while to the right is a 25 acre field planted with 130 tonnes (one tonne = 20,000 bulbs). A further 15 acre field with five varieties surrounds the house. So I get my daffodil ‘fix’ before breakfast, without leaving the house! Directly out of the window is ‘Rijnveld’s Early Sensation’, which was flowering before the end of January. In the garden I have ‘Spring Dawn’, which is usually the

first to flower but this year seems to be about 10 days behind. Following closely behind ‘Spring Dawn’ in the garden will be

‘Tamara’, one of the early Cornish varieties a bit taller than the previous varieties, so better suited as a cut flower for the house.

Strangely enough, given how common it is, the one variety I look forward to seeing as much as any is ‘Tête-à-Tête’. This variety is so versatile and suitable for so many applications, including tubs and containers, indoor pots and the garden.

I have ‘Tête-à-Tête’ planted in the rose border which can look so boring in February and March – just a load of sticks poking out of the wood chips – but when underplanted with ‘Tête-à-Tête’, the area is transformed. Last year, to contrast with the daffodils,