Introduction: Daffodils and Their Place in Our Culture Daffodils are somehow the quintessential spring flower. The appearance of their distinctive yellow blooms is a sure sign that winter has either ended or is about to soon. Unlike the tulip, which appears to be dependent on us for its continued re-emergence in the garden, daffodils reappear faithfully every year; and not just in the garden but in places such as roadsides, churchyards, and parks where they have been planted, often decades ago--in some cases over a century ago. These plants are clearly great survivors, thriving even in places where they have obviously been accidentally dropped or discarded--the flowers frequently mark where someone emptied the back of their car of garden waste into a ditch or hedge, little thinking that the event and scene of their crime would be annually and flamboyantly marked for so many years to come. There are around twenty-seven thousand unique cultivars of daffodil. Unlike other flowers--roses, tulips, orchids, whose numbers of deliberately bred varieties range across great swathes of the spectrum or show off an extravagant range of shapes--daffodils are remarkably alike. All single cultivars have the same basic shape--a cup (also called a corona) and petals (although botanists do not call them petals); even the doubles or the strange "split-corona" varieties easily betray their basic inheritance. Above all there is the colour, more or less every shade of yellow which can be imagined, but very little else: white of course, but then almost every flower has at least one white variant, some flashes of orange, but never very much, and that's it; there are so-called pink varieties, but they are more of a tan-apricot.

One of the fascinating things about daffodils is just how much play we can have with the same basic design and the same colour scheme, about how much breeders, the bulb trade, and we--the customers--keep on coming back for more, as if we can never leave this most successful design alone. At the heart of this book is the idea of the daffodil as a metaphor for our relationship with nature, as being a cultivated plant, but one which is capable of also living its own life. Like cats, they feel only partly domesticated. The book is as much about the daffodil as cultural icon as it is about the daffodil as garden plant. Daffodils appear in paintings and in poetry, as emblems of spring and of nature. This cultural status is surely a large part of their appeal; we buy them as tight buds from florists as early as we can at the end of the winter not just because we know they will be pretty and yellow, but because Wordsworth and other poets wrote about them, and they appear endlessly reproduced as a sign of spring at every level of art from the museum-hung masterpiece to souvenir-shop kitsch. The daffodil cut-flower industry is a big one, and historically it was something of a pioneer in the craft and business of how to transfer the golden promise of spring several hundred miles, from the field to the vase on the table. The social history of this industry is part of this book too, as it has been an important driver in directing how daffodils have been bred and appreciated.