Lucifer, Sunrise, Croesus and Bernardino, narcissi with orange cups and creamy-white petals, should be at their best but hail and wind have battered these successors to the yellow-trumpeted daffodils. Bath’s Flame, on a taller stem with spreading lemon-yellow petals and scarlet-rimmed centre, is also spoilt, part-eaten by snails and little slugs.
Here, on this historic market garden, about 20 old-fashioned varieties have been identified, still growing in their original patches and rows in woodland and, occasionally, cut grass; a tithe map from the 1840s shows the land as orchard, so the oldest sorts, Princeps and Van Sion, could date from then.
As on similar overgrown gardens, most of the bulbs were planted before the second world war and provided a succession of income from mid-February into April. In 1927, Mr Snell, a market gardener in the Radland Valley, recorded that he paid £20 for 4 hundredweight (203kg) of Ornatus bulbs (a poeticus type of narcissus); these, with the Double White, extended the season towards Whitsun.
Depending on weather and dates of remunerative festivals such as Mothering Sunday and Easter, daffodils were picked, bunched in dozens and the full-out blooms (forced open indoors if necessary) packed in boxes for dispatch to up-country markets via Saltash station or Kelly Bray.
During the war years, growers were required to replace luxury crops with food production but the steepest land was unsuitable for ploughing, so they continued with narcissi; then, in the 1950s, competition from specialised producers growing newer, more fashionable varieties ensured neglect of the old plots. On ground unaffected by earth-moving machinery, artificial fertilisers and sprays, the hardier bulbs naturalised and merged with bluebells, ferns, dog’s mercury and moschatel, shaded by scrub and trees.
Horticultural production in the area is now mainly in polytunnels and glasshouses, where pinks and alstroemeria can be produced for most of the year, shielded from adverse weather. Narcissi woods have become a distinctive feature of the valley and, on road-hedges through Bohetherick, towards Cotehele and its collection of historic daffodils, grows a profusion of discarded flower bulbs.
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