Carol Klein on her favourite daffs
Give them a go for a brilliant burst of early spring colour
It’s bulb planting time again and it’s just as exciting every time you do it! Bulbs have their own ritual; if you’re a keen gardener you probably order from a catalogue, working out what to plant where – and if you’re anything like me, ordering a few unplanned extras just because you’ve fallen in love with the photo or description.
We treat most of our tulips as annuals and grow the great majority in pots, drying them off after flowering and replanting a few of them in the veg garden for cut flowers. Narcissi, however, are treated differently, becoming permanent features and often multiplying and improving each spring. Daffodils relish our substantial soil, there are some clumps that we must have planted 30 or more years ago.
Most of the narcissi we choose are close to the species, singleflowered and scented. Although daffodil breeders are constantly introducing newer, fancier forms, with double flowers, pink petals or split coronas, they’re not for me. Choosing favourites in any field is a questionable exercise, but one of our own natives, Narcissus pseudonarcissus is perfect for naturalising in shady spots and where soil is damp and heavy.
The banks of the local rivers in North Devon are gilded with hundreds of their small but brilliant yellow flowers in early spring. They relish the heavy soil and seem to enjoy the few weeks they spend practically submerged. Many bulbs would object but these little daffodils have evolved with the constant rise and fall of the water and get better year on year. In our gardens they can be given equally rich fare, cosseted with compost, mulched with leaf mould, treated with anything to up the humus level.
Species plants are almost invariably more refined than the hybrids that are bred from them. With a purity and innocence never seen in the clumsier varieties, wild narcissus prove the point. It’s possible to choose species that originate in similar conditions to those prevailing in your garden and to make them feel perfectly at home. So N. pseudonarcissus is perfect in damp and heavy soil, the lovely lemon-yellow selection ‘W.P. Milner’ enjoys the same conditions, so too does N. poeticus recurvus, the narcissus of Greek legend. N. pseudonarcissus flowers early in late February while the poet’s narcissus is one of the last to bloom late in May.
If your garden's damp in spring choose one of the diminutive daffodils. N. cyclamineus, with swept back petals and the hoop-petticoat daffodil, N. bulbocodium, are both delightful.
Our garden here is full of white narcissi. ‘Thalia’ is one of the most dependable and one of the most elegant, a Triandrus hybrid often with two or three perfect white flowers. It mixes perfectly with pulmonarias or the bright blue forgetme-not flowers of Brunnera macrophylla.
When planting a new area with daffodils and perennials, the most efficient procedure is to plant the perennials first and, though this may sound obvious, it has been known for gardeners to do it the other way round. The old method of tossing the bulbs in the air then planting them where they land guarantees a natural, informal effect. Bulbs will do best when planted at four times their depth – it’s difficult to plant them too deep.
'Daffodils relish our substantial soil, there are some clumps we must have planted 30 or more years ago'