"When all at once I saw a crowd /
A host, of golden daffodils ..."
I.
Often known by its Latin name - Narcissus
[1] - the daffodil was as highly regarded in the ancient world as it is within the modern era: Greek philosopher and floraphile Theophrastus, for
example, often mentioned them in
his botanical writings; as did the Roman author and naturalist Pliny the Elder.
However, it was left to the 18th-century Swedish botanist Linnaeus to formally identify them as a genus in his Species Plantarum
(1753), at which time there were only six known species, whereas now there are
over fifty (although the exact number remains disputed) [2].
And
it was left to the British Romantic poets to really establish the
cultural and symbolic importance of the narcissus in the modern
imagination. For with the exception of the rose and the lily, no flower blossoms more within the pages of English literature than the daffodil; Wordsworth,
Shelley, and Keats all wrote of the eternal joy that these flowers can bring.
II.
But surely everyone - not just William Wordsworth and the Welsh - loves to see daffodils flowering in the spring, don't they?
At any rate, I love them: I love their bright golden colour and the manner in which a trumpet-shaped corona is surrounded by a six-pointed star formed by the tepals; and I love the fact they come up every year, regardless of external conditions, nodding in defiant affirmation of life.
But my love of daffoldils is also a class thing; the common daffodil growing by the roadside and at the bottom of the garden has none of the ornamental superiority or cultivated pretension of the tulip (a bulb that is in my mind forever associated with the nouveaux riches in 17th-century Europe).
III.
When I was a child - and neighbours still had front gardens, not driveways - I used to love stealing daffodils every Easter to give to my mother and I was touched that MLG should remember this and placed a single yellow flower in my mother's coffin prior to her funeral; she would have liked that [3].
And, of course, even without the personal context, such a gesture would have been entirely appropriate. For whilst daffodils often symbolise rebirth and resurrection, so too are they closely associated with death ...
The ancient Egyptians, for example, used to make decorative use of narcissi in their tombs, whilst the ancient Greeks considered these flowers sacred to both Persephone and Hades. Indeed, the former was said to be picking daffodils when she was abducted by the latter and taken to the Underworld.
The fact is, like many beautiful-looking things, daffodils are highly toxic, containing as they do the alkaloid poison lycorine - mostly in the bulb, but also in the stem and leaves - and if you ingest enough lycorine then death will follow a series of very unpleasant symptoms including acute abdominal pains, vomiting, diarrhea, trembling, convulsions and paralysis.
So do make sure, dear reader, that you know your onions and never confuse these with daffodil bulbs ...
Notes
[1] According to Greek myth, the beautiful-looking young man of this name - Νάρκισσος - rejected the romantic advances of others, preferring instead to gaze fixedly at his own reflection in a pool of water. After his death, it is said that a flower sprouted in the spot at which he spent his life sitting.
Interestingly, although the exact origin of the name is unknown, it is often linked etymologically to the Greek term from which we derive the English word narcotic (Narcissus was essentially intoxicated by his own beauty).
As for the word daffodil, this seems to be a corruption of asphodel, a flowering bulb to which the former is often compared.
[2] In 2006, the Royal Horticultural Society's International Daffodil Register and Classified List identified 87 species. But according to the World Checklist of Selected Plant Families produced in 2014, there are only 52 species (along with at least 60 hybrids). Whatever the correct figure might be, the fact is that many wild species have already become extinct and many others are increasingly under threat due to over-collection and the destruction of natural habitats.
[3] When my mother died last month, aged 96, she had been living with
dementia for almost a decade and it might be noted in relation to our
topic here that daffodils produce a number of alkaloids that have been
used in traditional forms of healing and one of which - gelantamine - is exploited in the production of a modern medicinal drug used to treat cognitive decline in those with Alzheimer's.
This post is for Maria.
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