The history of daffodils

Every shade of yellow

Daffodils’ uplifting yellow flowers and true perennial habit make them an enduring garden favourite. Clumps of daffodil bulbs have been known to survive in the ground for well over a century, flowering consistently for decades.

There are more than 27,000 cultivated varieties. Despite intensive breeding, however, most daffodils are yellow. Exceptions include the white-petalled 'poeticus' varieties and cultivars that diverge towards orange and salmon.

Modern daffodils

It can take five years for a daffodil to flower from seed. Until the 19th century, daffodils were either wild species or natural hybrids which had slowly increased over time. The modern daffodil evolved during the 1800s when breeders began to select flowers for different aesthetic qualities.

The daffodil maker

The Rev. George Herbert Engleheart is often credited as the father of the modern daffodil. In 1901 he moved to Little Clarendon in Wiltshire and continued his work producing new daffodil hybrids.

Engleheart registered 720 new daffodil varieties between 1882 and 1923, although only around 30 are still commercially available. His work with the poeticus species is his enduring legacy.

Cultural inspiration

Daffodils have inspired writers, poets and artists through the centuries. A favourite flower among the Romantic poets, they were immortalised by Wordsworth in his poem Daffodils, one of the most famous in the English language.

The poet’s line ‘A host of golden daffodils’ recalls the swathes of wild flowers discovered on a walk with his sister Dorothy along the shore of Ullswater in the Lake District in early April 1802.

Over the centuries, daffodils have been given many common or local names, including the daffodowndilly, yellow maiden and Lent lily, a reference to their flowering season coinciding with the period leading up to Easter.

Daffodowndilly was writer A.A. Milne’s choice for his poem about the flower, published in his book of verse for children, When We Were Very Young (1924).

‘She wore her yellow sun-bonnet, She wore her greenest gown; She turned to the south wind, And curtsied up and down...’

– From Daffodowndilly by A. A. Milne, 1924

Daffodils in National Trust gardens

From rare heritage varieties at Cotehele and Saltram along the Tamar valley to a daffodil memorial at Dora's Field in the Lake District, daffodils have played an important role in the history of many National Trust places.

Cotehele’s daffodil heritage

Cotehele in Cornwall has a particularly unique collection of daffodils. Varieties here include 19th-century hybrids, the surviving remnants of a major flower industry which once thrived along the Tamar valley.

Fields known locally as ‘Little Gardens’ were worked by generations of families, supplying flowers and fresh produce to national markets which flourished with the coming of the railways.

The industry declined after the Second World War and many of the old fields became overgrown and lost. Daffodil bulbs were discarded into hedgerows and the surrounding countryside where they continued to bloom, largely forgotten, for decades.

With help from a local grower, who donated old bulbs, the gardeners and volunteers at Cotehele rescued many of these rare daffodils. Catalogued and protected, they now grow alongside other historic daffodil varieties which have been established in the garden.