Which came first, the daffodil or the tulip? It's a trick question. I can never remember, so I paid attention this year. Early in April I had the answer as several pointy tulip leaves pushed up from the depths of the corner of the big vegetable garden. Slowly they rose, through snow and sleet and cold. Weeks later, the first blunt tips of daffodils emerged in front of the house. We didn't entirely expect to see them to the south of the path to our front door after Barry had applied a thick layer of earth last fall in an effort to get the front yard to stop sloping toward the house. Undeterred, the south daffodils kept pace with the north daffodils, rising rapidly and popping open their various yellow faces indisputably before the tulips. A saving grace this spring was the lack of a heavy wet snow coming to topple the grown daffodils. Tulips followed soon after, giving a warm glow to the back yard. Roughly eighty flowers opened in one little corner. This fall I should dig up a few and spread the warmth for next spring. Anyway, either answer to the question can be the correct one.
It may be unfair, but I have some reservations about daffodils and tulips. There's just something a little add-water-and-stir about them. A little manufactured. Is it because they've been bred six ways from Sunday? Is it their simplicity - the long flat leaves and few large petals? Pretty sure that I spent Grade Two art period drawing tulips, not columbine. Maybe I'm unimpressed by their lack of endurance. The daffodil flowers have shriveled away, more tulip petals are on the ground than on the stems, and what is left looks a bit absurd. These plants are nothing without their showy flowers. This feels like a very petty complaint about plants that give us such a happy burst of colour so (relatively) early in the season. Other people's smart arrays of different coloured bulb flowers give me great pleasure as I hike along residential streets. I find I like them best when juxtaposed with perfect lawn grass and walkways lifted from Architectural Digest. Our yard is more likely to be seen on the pages of Ramshackle Monthly. Maybe the perfection of tulips and daffodils are out of place in the unkempt, undesigned spaces they light up here every May. I like them, and look forward to seeing them, but they are a different class of organism, somewhere between my delicate saxifrage and the neighbour's year-round container of artificial flowers.
Which came first, the daffodil or the tulip? It's a trick question. I can never remember, so I paid attention this year. Early in April I had the answer as several pointy tulip leaves pushed up from the depths of the corner of the big vegetable garden. Slowly they rose, through snow and sleet and cold. Weeks later, the first blunt tips of daffodils emerged in front of the house. We didn't entirely expect to see them to the south of the path to our front door after Barry had applied a thick layer of earth last fall in an effort to get the front yard to stop sloping toward the house. Undeterred, the south daffodils kept pace with the north daffodils, rising rapidly and popping open their various yellow faces indisputably before the tulips. A saving grace this spring was the lack of a heavy wet snow coming to topple the grown daffodils. Tulips followed soon after, giving a warm glow to the back yard. Roughly eighty flowers opened in one little corner. This fall I should dig up a few and spread the warmth for next spring. Anyway, either answer to the question can be the correct one.
It may be unfair, but I have some reservations about daffodils and tulips. There's just something a little add-water-and-stir about them. A little manufactured. Is it because they've been bred six ways from Sunday? Is it their simplicity - the long flat leaves and few large petals? Pretty sure that I spent Grade Two art period drawing tulips, not columbine. Maybe I'm unimpressed by their lack of endurance. The daffodil flowers have shriveled away, more tulip petals are on the ground than on the stems, and what is left looks a bit absurd. These plants are nothing without their showy flowers. This feels like a very petty complaint about plants that give us such a happy burst of colour so (relatively) early in the season. Other people's smart arrays of different coloured bulb flowers give me great pleasure as I hike along residential streets. I find I like them best when juxtaposed with perfect lawn grass and walkways lifted from Architectural Digest. Our yard is more likely to be seen on the pages of Ramshackle Monthly. Maybe the perfection of tulips and daffodils are out of place in the unkempt, undesigned spaces they light up here every May. I like them, and look forward to seeing them, but they are a different class of organism, somewhere between my delicate saxifrage and the neighbour's year-round container of artificial flowers.
This year the daffodils were open halfway through April and the retulips aren't open almost three weeks later. The white tulips opened last week.
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