A few years ago the Head Gardener and I visited our son in
Dunedin at about this time of the year. During
the time we were in the south we ventured up to the Duntroon/Earthquakes area
to look at some remarkable fossils and Maori cave art. The landscape along the various valleys of North
Otago was amazing, but there was a surreal quality to much of it, caused by the
outbreak of intensive dairy farming in selected areas. The region is largely very dry, with porous
limestone and relatively recent gravels forming
much of the soil, and by the end of the warm summer most of the paddocks are usually
mouse coloured. But scattered among
these burnt paddocks were outcrops of outrageously green fields, where the
combination of irrigation and fertiliser betrayed the presence of dairying.
This year our garden looks a bit like that – the lawn have
died off, except for a small margin of error at the edges where they receive
some spill over from watering the gardens, and the only green is in the garden
beds.
I am a bit worried about how dry even some of the flower
beds are though, as I want to have a bit of a daffodil blitz this year. Although I am a great iris lover I am also
very taken with daffodils, and have a large number of different types growing
in the garden and in pots, and this year I want to expand that number a lot –
even aiming for a host of golden daffodils perhaps.
If good strong-growing yellow daffodils are what you are looking
for there are a couple of older varieties you should keep an eye out for, ‘Malvern
City’ and ‘Carlton’. Both are gold on
gold forms – they have both golden petals and golden cups – and are both very
reliable flowering forms that are long lasting.
‘Malvern City’ is very early in the season, and is quite tall, growing
to about 50cm at full height. ‘Carlton’
is a little later and is a bit chunkier, flowering at 40cm, but is perhaps a
little hardier. They will both do very
well as cut flowers.
If you are looking for more contrast you could try one of
the varieties with white petals and golden cups, as the colour contrast makes
them stand pout very well in the garden. For early in the season you should look out
for ‘Moneymaker’, which has cream petals and a large golden cup and always
looks bright in the garden. The petals
are probably a little misshapen if you are trying to win medals at the local
flower show, but for garden value it is great.
I have grown ‘Ice Follies’ for a few years now – a lovely
white daffodil with white petals and cream cups. I have found it to be a reliable flowering
form, growing about 35 cm high and very hardy in the wind and rain. If you wanted more colour from this kind of
form you should try ‘Orange Ice Follies’, which despite its name is not really orange-cupped
but rather deep gold toned.
Small flowered double daffodils are, of course, very
popular, none more so than the exquisitely scented ‘Erlicheer’, which can even
be in flower as early as May in some gardens.
To be brutally honest it is no great shakes to look at, but it more than
makes up for its lack of elegance with the powerful scent it carries. At the opposite end of the season, ‘Cheerfuless’ provides much the same scent on
a slightly tidier flower. ‘Golden
Cheerfulness’ is even better I think, although the colour is a little light to
really be called golden – at times it is almost chartreuse, but this
moderately-sized daffodil is one of my favourites.
The Head Gardener is a great fan of the pink-cupped daffodils,
and we grow a few of them. My favourite
among these is probably ‘Accent’, even though it is not the pinkest (certainly
not the luscious pink you find in tall bearded irises). The cups are more properly called salmon
pink, or perhaps even a peachy orange, but this plant is just so reliable and
the flowers hold their colour so well that I would not be without this in my
large border.
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