Williamson's Weekly Nature Notes- March 25 2009

Their destination was on the Herefordshire and Gloucestershire borders. There, they could walk along the meadows which used to grow wild daffs in colonies, pick as many as they wanted, or buy bunches from cottagers. Whenever I see the golden flowers, I think of the gold colour of the domes and smokestacks of those glorious old engines.

Eighty years old and more now, a handful of historic engines were saved from the cutter's torch nearly half a century ago. This example is the only King left in the world.

But the wild daffodil, together with the steam era, was virtually swept into oblivion, by the diesel revolution.

Tractors helped cause an agricultural revolution while diesel engines finished coal and steam. The Lake District daffodils are most famous as Wordsworth wandered lonely as a cloud, but the Dymoch poets, Robert Frost, Edward Thomas and Lascelles Abercrombie, also gave spirit of place for the lentern lily from their commune in the Golden Triangle.

Daffodils have always had a special place in our culture. Shakespeare knew they opened "before the swallow dares".

He also knew that "When daffodils begin to peer, with heigh! the doxy over the dale; why then comes in the sweet of the year, for the red blood reigns in the winter's pale!".

But urban daffs, with double heads and trumpets like saxophones, became vulgar enough to be trashed by modern poets like Philip Larkin. They had become narcissistic, representing over-exploitat as well as flashy ephemerism.

The original wild daffodil is like our downland churches, acerbic, small, cool and gracious with enough decent piety to be trusted for their honest intent.

There are 100 separate Sussex colonies. They hide in the depths of the wild woods and when the March sun suddenly shines out of hail and harsh grey, they laugh gold and clean across the mind, dancing madly in the wind, glad to be let out of the damp winter ground and up into the blue sky of spring.