This week is a busy week at the Royal Horticultural Society halls in Vincent Square, London. It's a week I look forward to every year. On Tuesday and Wednesday there is the early spring flower show and at the weekend it's the orchid show.
The shows are on more or less once a month and are full of nurseries selling their wares. In this case, spring bulbs, delicate irises and fritillaries, and the first of the primulas. There was also the early camellia and early daffodil competitions.
I can't say I am naturally drawn toward 'father natures' attempts to hybridize the daffodil, over the years I've come to love the wild daffodils of the world and the simpler forms of naturalizing daffs' growing in gardens or on banks, heralding the possibility that spring is here or at least on it's way.
In Cornwall and the isles of Scilly, early in the year, you can see fields of green breaking into yellow being cut and packed into boxes as the crop of daffodils are sent on their way to the less mild parts of Britain. Each year, my earliest glimpse of a daffodil is when these cut flowers make it to the flower stall of the market on Queens Crescent, and only then do I know we have rounded the corner from winter to spring.
On the competition benches the daffodils come in all shapes and sizes, some with delicate pale flowers as small as a little finger nail, others with much larger blooms doing the can-can in lurid yellows and pinks. The curious thing is I've started to like them all, it's taken me some time and I'm not sure I want to see many of them in a garden either. But somehow in small glass vases, against a dark green hessian background, on parade awaiting the judges' inspection, I am won over.
I even brought one home with me, a small ragged double, "Queen Anne's Double Daffodil (Narcissus pseudonarcissus eystettensis).
I am looking forward to the main daffodil show which will be on the 15th and 16th of April at Vincent Square.
Do you have a favourite daffodil?
