Roadside Daffodils have made it into the Guardian this week in Patrick Barkham’s Notebook.
I was slightly nervous in raising the subject of my feelings for feral daffodils at all last week, but I’m glad I did. It was good to get it off my chest and even better to find a fair measure of support for my ambivalence about planted daffs in the countryside.
I’m not claiming that planted, feral, roadside daffodils are causing any particular conservation harm to other species, although I don’t really buy the argument that their presence saves the verges from being scalped (because these verges will be scalped after the daffs are gone if not forgotten later this spring). No it’s more an aesthetic thing for me – although quite a complicated one.
I really am not keen on the cultivated daffodils with lots of white or orange in their flowers. It’s a personal choice, but I like my daffodils to be yellow. Preferably a not-too-gaudy, subtle, pale-medium yellow. People can grow what they want in their gardens of course, and we all do (I have some great weeds in mine), but I’m really not sure why someone feels comfortable about imposing their daffodil taste on the rest of us in the wider countryside.
Still, maybe Andrea Leadsom could lead the ‘public debate’ over the acceptable faces of roadside feral daffodils and everything would be alright in the end.
But presumably at the moment, if it is OK for someone to impose their daffodil preference on me and everyone else by planting their chosen daffodils in my, our, shared countryside, then I guess it’s equally OK for me to go around digging them up to express my preference and impose that on everyone too? I must put a garden fork in the car boot. Or maybe Monsanto would sponsor me with gallons of one of their environmentally friendly products.
‘Daff Wars’ here we come?
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Yes it was good last week to find you and I were not alone in our dislike of cultivated daffodils planted in the wild and we agree again about our preference in gardens. My partner down in Wales loves daffs and has a host of cultivars, some I’m not that keen on. A colleague once suggested that putting garden plants and non natives out in the wild is illegal under The Wildlife and Countryside Act, Nice if it were, not because I want to prosecute but its a damned good argument when trying to get it stopped.
Another conceit is the creation of ersatz wild flower lawns and meadows using non-local seed of unknown, unregistered, provenance.
(If people want to do something for insects, plough the land back to its subsoil and expose latent seed banks. Or, go out in late summer and have a good time collecting wild flower seed heads around the parish)
At least with planted daffs there’s no pretense; everybody knows they are interlopers and feral.
Using non-native seed is a no-no, but when using native seed its a different matter imo. There are some excellent native seed suppliers around days such Emorsgate and Flower Farms who can tell you provenance of the seed they source for their own seed production. Using this type of seed has enabled meadow creation on some sites and scales that wouldn’t really be feasible using green hay or hand collected seed.
I’m not overly worried about the local factor, people have been moving seeds around for 1000’s of years, especially in the last 400 years or so. Yes you wouldn’t use non-local seed when creating a meadow next to an existing one, but it’s a different story when creating ‘island’ meadows in a typical farmland landscape.
Plus ploughing the land back and leaving it will pretty much guarantee you’ll get a “meadow” composed pretty much solely of either dock or rosebay willowherb and nothing else.
Spot-on!
Minimal soil disturbance is the key, direct drilling works well. Ploughing just mineralises N which is the last thing you want.
Ernest, I hadn’t thought of that. But surely the mineralised N would soon be leached out?
Some will leach out during the course of the following winter or two, but for a period, potentially there will be an abundance of NH4 and NO3 available for plant uptake which can favour the establishment of many of the aggressive plants, especially grasses that you really don’t want to encourage in a hay meadow. A lot depends of the site though.
‘A lot depends on the site’.
Quite right: sandy soils lose nitrate very rapidly. Deep ploughed sand quickly ends up with almost zero nitrate – perfect for resurrecting seeds of the past.
A little bit of deferred gratification on such sites gives many rewards and can produce genuine mini rewilding.
OK, if it doesn’t work and you get too much ruderal vegetation, what’s the problem – you have an important habitat in its own right? And if that doesn’t please everyone, go for the conceit, use weed killer then drill with your bought in seed mix.
Ploughing deep should be tried first; there are all sorts of surprises to be had.
But you are going to be right if the ground is saturated with nitrates; that’s why it’s important to get geological and down to the subsoil. Quarries are a good example of the way plant diversity quickly accelerates on bare rock strata like chalk and sand. That’s why introducing seed mixes and landscaping abandoned quarries is such a waste of effort. I’s also very unexciting.
Thanks, I sort of take your point about the fact that stuff has already been moved about a lot but there is just something very special the way plants turn up via serendipity and make their home somewhere — be it a pavement crack or the corner of a field. No amount of bone fide seed mix can replicate that moment of discovery and wonder. And we haven’t even discussed the way plant distributions, esp. disjunct ones, go into deep time and have many biological, historical and sociological stories to tell.
You have great wild flowers in your garden not weeds. :)))
There’s an assumption that native Daffs are threatened by hybridisation with the planted cultivars, presumably people have seen the bluebell story and assumed the same applies to Daffodils.
Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust produced this interesting leaflet on wild daffs
http://www.gloucestershirewildlifetrust.co.uk/sites/default/files/State%20of%20the%20Natural%20Environment%20Wild%20Daffodils.pdf
In which they state that there is concern but no firm evidence of hybridisation. I’d be very interested to hear from any readers who have seen hybridisation between native and cultivated Daffs in the wild. [email protected]
Thanks for the really interesting GWT link – from what it says not only has the native wild daffodil spread by seed but from what it doesn’t say we might infer that the NWD is homozygous. Cultivated daffs being genetic chocolate boxes (sensu Gump) any hybrids between NWD and cultivars would show great diversity in the F1 and would be instantly spotted after 4-7 years.
Yes I think you’re right Filbert.
The care and difficulty of successfully raising new fertile hybrids under garden conditions, suggests to me that spontaneous fertile hybrids between cultivars and wild species do not appear, or only very rarely, in the wild. Sterile hybrids might appear but would pose no threat to the wild species.
This is also an interesting peek into the history of Daffodil breeding and the Cornish Daffodil growing industry.
http://www.caerhays.co.uk/page.cfm?page=daffodil_breeding
Richard Mabey writes about the mysterious decline of the native Daffodil in Flora Britannica, including several mentions of people deliberately planting wild daffodil bulbs in places where they were not known before.
Daffophobes should pray that Pink Tasmanians stay put
I would much rather see Daffs in the Guardian than in the wider countryside. I know it’s different but I also hate those piles of rocks that hill walkers decide should be built on every peak they visit. Often they are the only human-constructed thing visible in an otherwise semi-natural landscape. I always take one rock off rather than add one on the basis that I’d rather they weren’t there but it’s probably not my choice to dismantle the whole thing.
Doubtless there are some daffodils on rural verges that have been planted deliberately for whatever bizarre or mawkish reason, but I suspect that many arrive as seed in fly-tipped garden waste or on contractors’ machinery. After all – who goes around dead-heading all the urban verges? Gardeners don’t bother with daffs from seed as they take so long to reach the age of consent. It is likely that the double varieties shown in the pix will be male sterile, so happily they won’t be going anywhere at random.
Mawkish?
I work for a wildlife organisation. I remember one of our volunteers proudly telling me how she and few other villagers had raised money to buy some snowdrops and daffs and plant them round their village sign. I gently pointed out that it was the countryside and they were, effectively, turning it into a garden. She was astonished, it simply hadn’t crossed her mind.
I’d love to see our verges more varied and colourful – but I’d like to see that because councils were managing the verges for the native stuff.
In the village where my father lives members of the parish council decided to raise money to plant LOADS of bulbs through the village!
The person on the steering group was a former Natural England employee, I was somewhat astonished! I politely yet strongly expressed why I thought planting loads of daffodils, snowdrops and crocus allong the verges was not a good idea and the opportunities to create and encourage verges with native flora would be far better and may even get funding from the National Park. But I was too late they had gone ahead with prettifying the village verges – it looks plastic!
Is a person who hates daffodils a narcissist? 😉
Janice – very good!
I was wondering if their fans were Daff-ties?
Plant some other wildflowers, restore some hedgerows ~ then go ahead and dig up the daffs. For now, they can be the difference between life and death for bumblebees who awake from hibernation and have to feed within a few metres.
If you’d ever seen an exhausted bumblebee on the ground in spring, snapped off a nearby daffodil head, offered it to the bee and watched it climb inside and feed then fly away, you might readjust your aesthetic sensitivities.
To bee …
“To bee …” Or not 2B, what is the pencil?
Following this line of thinking I presume you would you like to see every Maple, Dogwood, Walnut, and Sycamore chopped down or any of the other tens of thousands of introduced floral species that have become part of our landscape? Our countryside is a patchwork of planting for practical or aesthetic reasons, of times both. Pol Pot would be proud of you.
Richard – no logician would be proud of you. Thank you for your comment.
Erm … well field maple is native?!
Nonsense. You are wrapping your aesthetic preferences in a thin veil of native species pseudo science…Plus your de rigeur dig at Andrea Leadsom. As a naturalist (sic) you should be advocating the planting of pollinators, particularly seeing as the daffodils you decry are non seeding varieties and/or will not cross pollinate with native species. You are a souless man Dr Avery.
I’m a naturalist too, Richard – should I be promoting Himalayan Balsam and Japanese knotweed? You know, for the pollinators…. Pull your head out of the proverbial daffodil’s trumpet, man.
the Welsh Snipe – thank you for your comment.
I like the ones with a yellow trumpet and white petals.
I’m sorry. I do understand the argument, and would never wild plant them, but I’m not going to be first in line to rip them up either.
I think the real problem here is time. The UK is a very young island in many ways; the time period between the ice sheets resetting the environmental clock and the land bridge connecting us to the continent is just too recent and too short a period. It has left us with a relatively impoverished palate of flora and fauna and that in turn has been exacerbated by us humans extirpating so many of the examples of flora and fauna that did make it. I mean give us a couple of million years and we’d be a veritable New Zealand or Madagascar with everything that did make it taking on new forms to adapt properly to all the available niches and creating new niches too as they went along. We’ll be a garden of exciting new flora and fauna. The only problem is that we humans don’t like waiting on geological timescales so we start thinking of all the ways we can hasten the changes…
Anyway. Going over the pass to town would be very bleak, for me at least, without some of those splashes of yellow against the mucky browns and dull greys of mud and rain clouds. Gaudy. Tacky. Campy. Artificial. Plasticky. Lifesaving. I’m sorry.
Agree with most of this Random22. I’m not a purist either. However, I do get fed up of the gaudier daffodils.
What really gets me angry though is the ripping/slashing of hedgerows by machinery. Also the crown lopping of trees when they may be casting a bit of shade. Almost better to cut them down completely (the trees) rather than leave them with stubby limbs crowned with twiglets. But I admit that’s because it upsets me whenever I see it – I suppose they still provide some environmental benefit. And tidying up fallen leaves except on hard surfaces. Just leave them!
So we all have our bugbears/prejudices. Its taken me a long time to persuade the other half not to shave the lawn every few days in summer. But perhaps I am just lazy & untidy in some peoples eyes. I know the neighbour doesn’t like our dandelions!
To please your neighbour plant hundreds of Doronicums
Daff Wars? Bring them on! It’s the brassy, gaudiness of the ‘ferals’ that I detest – tarts of the plant world! Give me the delicate, wild variety or a bank of native celandines and primroses any day – no contest!
No daffs in my garden at all. But maybe some dill in the herb patch.
Quite a while ago now A naturalist lady of my acquaintance told me amongst several a story of an African guy here to train with I think Yorkshire Wildlife Trust as part of his training in conservation. Before he returned to Africa he was asked about his most memorable experiences in the UK. One was the masses of yellow flowers on roadside verges in late April and early May, he meant Dandelions a plant that turns many verges into a wonderful site in late spring. We should be celebrating our natives not replacing them with non natives, they do not compliment each other. Even as a purist I know that a number of non natives are sadly here for good but cultivated daffodils– a definite no thank you from me at least.
52% (a clear majority) of Brits voted ‘like’ to daffodils, so there is a mandate to cover the countryside in daffodils.
On the radio they covered a story of a man and his two daughters who on the way round to the kids gran’s house stopped to pick some Daff’s. The police officer stopped, confiscated 27 Daff’s and warned them they were breaking the law by picking wildflowers. The reaction of the listeners was amazing “everyone was appalled” by the dad and his daughters actions!