Daffodils revive flower power


We were delighted when Carol announced at the end of the choir practice that the large bucket of daffodils was a gift to us and that there were several more in the back of her car downstairs. I gathered a small armful, wrapped them in newspaper like fish and chips and bore them home as a hundred tiny sunrises.

When I was a child my dad played five hundred in a local card club at the RSA hall every Thursday night. He was good at it and often we would wake on Friday morning to discover a box of chocolates or three tins of fruit that he had won the night before neatly arranged on the kitchen bench.

This week I have woken to a riot of daffodils – spoils of the choir. My impulsive arrangement in a glass beer jug has been successfully triaged by Sylvia and the blooms are now artfully arranged in several vases around the kitchen. One bunch consorts with a blushing cyclamen near the fridge, another plays ‘touch you last’ with an out-of-control aloe vera on the windowsill.

They beam at me, these daffodils, as I eat my breakfast and I find myself slowing down, drawn into their sunny smiles and silent chatter.

“Warm to us,” they say. “We are spring. Elevate yourself. Rise up. Lighten your heart.”

Perhaps this long, miserable winter has made me impressionable. Perhaps the current mood of uncertainty draws me towards a simpler truth. Whatever the reason, I am enchanted by these flowers. I gaze at them with Wordsworthian intensity, studying them in a way that I haven’t for many years.

To my astonishment I discover that daffodils are not the flowers they used to be. In fact they have completely transformed since I last checked. Where once they were uniformly yellow – yellow petals, yellow trumpets, yellow stamens – they are now a multitude of different colours. Some have white petals and delicate pink trumpets. Here’s one that looks like a fried egg, with creamy petals and a tight, darkly red trumpet. Another has petals like a dawn sky, pale primrose streaked with dashes of gold.

It is not just the colours that have changed; the daffodil’s shape too has transformed. Petals may be bold, soft and lacy or alluringly frilled. Trumpets are now an entire brass section: boozy, blaring tubas, tight-lipped trombones and snub-nosed cornets. There is one flower whose trumpet has completely exploded into four pieces as crazy and complex as a sea anemone or an Elizabethan ruff.

I have counted 9 different daffodils in the bunch I brought home from the choir.

These mutations are almost certainly not accidental. No doubt they are the product of artful and laborious propagation, of science improving nature. I would not be surprised to discover that the daffodil is now an industry, with jealously guarded patents and breathless investors whose fortunes stand or fall on the success of this year’s new varieties. In a world where almost every form of beauty has a price the bulbs that grew these blooms may be rooted deeply in the corporate mire. Even now a tiny fragment of Wall Street may be dedicated to daffodil stocks, and perhaps those stocks will be swept away in the backwash of the next insurance company or mortgage lender that goes bust.

And if that happens, then what? Will my daffodils turn to dust? Will they vanish like zeroes in my bank account? For that matter, are they less beautiful for being the products of genetic modification and corporate profiteering?

Of course not. They are as beautiful as babies, and as innocent. They gladden the heart and quicken the spirit. They are life.