A Timeless History
The Greeks called it narkissos, after the youth who could not look away from his own reflection. Wales made it its flower much later: Lloyd George wore a daffodil on St David's Day and put it into the investiture of 1911 at Caernarfon, in Wales.
SourceEncyclopaedia Britannica — britannica.com, “Narcissus” · Amgueddfa Cymru – Museum Wales — museum.wales, “St David's Day”
Science In Action
Six tepals — three petals and three sepals, shaped alike, forming the landing surface • The corona — the trumpet, a wall that holds the six stamens and funnels the insect down to the nectar • The spathe — the papery sheath the bud bursts through, left hanging dry below the open flower • The bulb — a compressed stem storing food; by late summer next year's flower is already formed inside
SourceRoyal Botanic Gardens, Kew — kew.org · Ohio State University Extension — bygl.osu.edu, “Daffodils or Jonquils”
Arts
Dorothy Wordsworth wrote them into her journal beside Ullswater, in England's Lake District, on 15 April 1802 — they “tossed and reeled and danced.” Two years later her brother William turned that entry into “I wandered lonely as a cloud,” published in 1807 and now among the best-known poems in English. Glover painted the same shore twenty years on.
SourceThe Wordsworth Trust · Dorothy Wordsworth, Grasmere Journals, 15 April 1802 — wordsworth.org.uk
Applications Today
In the Black Mountains of Powys, in Wales, at 300 metres, one farm grows daffodils not for the flower but for galantamine, a drug prescribed to slow the symptoms of Alzheimer's disease. Bulbs grown that high yield more of it than lowland ones — about 20 kilos a year, enough for some 9,000 patients.
SourceUK Government, “Welsh-grown daffodils help tackle Alzheimer's” — gov.uk
The daffodil belongs to the amaryllis family, together with the snowdrop, the onion and the leek.
Narcissus — Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio — c. 1597–1599 — Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica, Palazzo Barberini, Rome — inv. 1569
