March Birth Flower: Daffodils

Were you born in March? The daffodil is your birth month flower, and the landscape is alight with their sunny glow all during the month of March. It is a bloom with symbolic meaning, included in the language of flowers, and a beautiful cut flower, but most of all easy to grow!

Welcome to the world of Narcissus

I have always grown these spring flowers which look like liquid sunshine covering hills and filling dells. Narcissus look best when planted in clusters or as drifts, but are beautiful when naturalized in random areas under trees and shrubs, in a meadow, on a hill, or in partly wild areas.

Plant March's Flower In Your Yard This Fall

Narcissus In Your Landscape

Natural plants in a rock garden, especially some of the species or miniature types, they will provide carefree blooms that mix particularly well with some of the low growing perennials that inhabit the rockery.

Do you have a patch of lawn that you don't mind leaving a bit wild and un-mown through June? This might be a good spot to naturalize Dutch Master or another Trumpet type. The golden yellow carries well visually and the plants are sturdy with good multiplying characteristics. Why not around the mailbox if it is by the road, or like my father did, plant a whole bunch in the "hell strip" between sidewalk and street. I like them surrounding my tree in the backyard, mixed with grape hyacinths. Plant on the verge of woodland, on berms, within flower beds.

What not to do? Stand them in a line like stiff little soldiers in a row.

One of the real benefits of growing the narcissus bulbs in your garden is the way they easily multiply. Not only do daffodils persist year after year (you can often see stands of them long after a house may be gone), but it is easy to list and replant for many more of your favorites.

My mother often dug them up after the foliage had died and stored them in a shady place in the garage. Sometimes in a netted bag (the kind fruit is sold in). More often that special treatment was used for tulips, and the daffodils survived simply kept in an old dishpan. That is how she handed a huge amount of unnamed bulbs to me which I hurriedly planted. They are still blooming for me today, after many years.

Another benefit? Planted with other bulbs the calcium oxalate crystals and alkaloids in all parts of the plant will repel rodents who like to eat tulips and crocus.

How Do Daffodils Look?

• The Blooms
• The Leaves
• Classification
• Forcing Varieties

Daffodil flowers are made of a corona and a corolla. The corona is what we call the trumpet or cup. The corolla is made of the surrounding petals as a group. The perianth is the petal, both the calyx and individual petal segments which make up the corolla. Narcissus can be all of a color or have contrasts between the two main parts. Colors of the daffodil are categorized as Y, W, O, R, P, or G. These stand for Yellow, White, Orange, Red, Pink, or Green.

Leaves are usually spear or strap shaped, although some varieties have rush like leaves. They are a pleasing medium green with a soft faint bloom to them. These leaves are often the bane of gardeners when the flowering is over, and some tie them in rubber bands or braid them. They aren't ugly, but they do fade and wither. Don't ever cut them or soon the daffodils will be gone. Leaves are the energy making part of the plant and their strength goes to producing the storage bulbs. It is necessary for them to do their work to produce the big, beautiful flowers next year.

• Kingdom: Plantae
• Division: Magnoliophyta
• Class: Liliopsida
• Order: Asparagales
• Family: Amaryllidaceae
• Genus: Narcissus

Daffodils for Forcing

If you desire some previews of spring during the dark days of winter, these sunny daffodils are good varieties to force for early blooms.

• Browning (small cup, white and orange)
• Bridal Gown (double, creamy yellow)
• Carlton (large cup, yellow)
• February Gold (miniature yellow)
• Flower Record (large cup, white and orange)
• Mount Hood (large trumpet, white)

Information from Bulbs: Four Seasons of Beautiful Blooms

The 'daffodil code': The first number is the division, the letter or group of letters that follows the number is the petal color from the outside in. The second letter or group of letters are the corona colors from the eye-zone to the edge or rim.

 Need To Know The Divisions?

Click the arrow.

Daffodils from the early days of Spring to the late ones are possible, you just have to know the varieties that bloom in the early, mid , or late part of the season.

It is a way to stretch the blossom time of your favorite flower in other plants, too, but I like daffodils so well and they were the perfect flower or illustrating this technique. The different narcissus were just the right example for the "Stretching the Bloom Season" post.

Find the variety of Daffodil that flowers in the bloom time you are planning for your garden pictures.

Links

Daffodil Society

Bulb Basics

Poet's Narcissus

Plant Sources:

John Scheepers

Nature Hills Spring Flower Bulbs

Old House Heirloom Daffodils

My Youtube Bulb-Growing Tutorials

Informative Daffy Discussion

Love all the tips these two ladies share, really worth the time to listen.

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  my mother's gift

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  A small and early variety

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  pink daffodils

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  daffodils remain, juniper gone

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Designing With Daffodils

Without reservation, the best way to use daffodils is in a natural setting, in a scattered, random planting scheme. (To look naturally growing, even when you have calculated their places). When planted in beds, the narcissus family always looks a bit unhappy, as though something wild has been corraled and penned up.

Do use clusters of at least five if you situate them in flower beds, and remember that it is almost impossible not to slice into a few if you are digging in it later in the season. This is why I prefer them to be set about in places where the grass can be a bit ragged and the daffodils left to naturalize or at least look that way.