Last month, I saw wild daffodils for the first time in my life. Despite its profound cultural place in this country, Narcissus pseudonarcissus is now a scarce native found mainly towards the west of England and Wales. In recent days, I’ve returned to watch the stands wither, until there is just a handful of last spent blooms and even the wet-green leaves appear to be shrinking into the earth, like a creature going back to its burrow.
These wildflowers have meant more than all the domesticated versions in all the vases that I’ve ever met. I know this because I have never knowingly photographed cultivars, except once in south Lincolnshire, in a state of horror, at the regiments of mathematically aligned, chemically assisted, commercial daff crops that smothered the dead-flat cubes of soil like yellow gloss paint.
Here in the woods, I took great care to capture the details of the wild versions: the difference between the pale lemon of the outer whorl’s six twisting spikes and the unalloyed gold of the inner perianth; the way the trumpet was barely wider at its irregularly lobed mouth than it was at the base; but also how their heads moved endlessly in the breeze. Despite their many glorious vernacular names – a favourite is “daffydowndilly” – not one of them seems to reference the flower’s eternal restlessness.
I marvel even more how DH Lawrence captured this quality perfectly: “the short-stemmed flowers, rustling and fluttering and shivering, so bright and alive, but with nowhere to hide their faces, as they turned away from the wind”. And all this, I presume, from memory of his own Derbyshire woods, given that he wrote Lady Chatterley’s Lover in Italy.
The question that has hung over my spring encounters is why the wildflowers mean so much more than any garden show or cut spray on the mantlepiece? I’ve concluded that it is because they owe nothing to us. They are entirely a self‑determining, ancient province of brief and fragile gold; and also perhaps that their indifference to me and my kind offers an opportunity for love in its truest, purest form.
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