Wild Daffodils, Narcissus pseudonarcissus, at Hethel church, Norfolk. 27th March 2023.

“I wandered lonely as a cloud…“

Well, actually, I didn’t wander. I was on a bike ride south-west of Norwich in late March. I had lunch at Great Moulton church and stopped off at Hethel church on my way home.

Wild Daffodils, Narcissus pseudonarcissus, were growing in both churchyards and they were at their very peak.

Wild Daffodils, Narcissus pseudonarcissus, at Hethel church, Norfolk. 27th March 2023.

I love Daffodils. They’re one of the cheeriest and most definitive signs of spring, mainly flowering in mid to late March in Norfolk but in April further north.

Even the smallest garden usually has some daffodils. There are plenty to choose from: 36 species of Narcissus worldwide and more than 26,000 cultivated varieties.

Stace has just over six pages on Narcissus and lists 26 species and hybrids that grow in the wild in the British Isles, nearly all escapes from cultivation (note 1).

My least favourite are the double-flowered varieties (in Division 4), which I find rather ugly, although even these look pretty from a distance. But Wild Daffodils, Narcissus pseudonarcissus, are gorgeous and some of the very best Narcissus in form and colour. They are especially lovely in a wild setting but also make good garden flowers. Some have been planted in Norwich’s Heigham Park, a few minutes walk from where I live, in grass under trees by the park entrance.

The Wild Daffodil is a bit shorter than many of the garden cultivars (40 – 60cm tall) and has narrow, grey-green leaves. The flowers are two-tone, with pale yellow ‘petals’ (actually tepals  – undifferentiated petals and sepals) surrounding a darker yellow trumpet (the corona).

Narcissus pseudonarcissus is a perennial plant. Its leaves die back after flowering and spends the summer, autumn and early winter below ground, as a bulb. Over time, each bulb produces offsets (young bulbs), and clumps of daffodils form.

Our native daffodil

Narcissus pseudonarcissus is native to Britain and the Channel Isles but in Ireland it is a neophyte (a plant introduced after 1492). The 2020 Plant Atlas shows its current distribution. As a wild flower it is in decline but it has been planted in many places, so that “The extent of its native range in our area is probably now intractable given the extent of planting“. The 2020 Plant Atlas suggests there has been “some increase in alien occurrences in widely scattered parts of both Britain and Ireland whilst there may have been some recent losses of native populations, especially around the fringes of core areas in south-western England, the West Midlands and north-western England“.

Nowadays the main places to see Wild Daffodils in the wild are in the south-west (Devon, Somerset and Gloucestershire), Cumbria, the Black Mountains in Wales and the counties along the Welsh border.

The Woodland Trust website lists three of its woods with good populations: Letah Wood in Northumberland, Everdon Stubbs in Northamptonshire and Oldmoor Wood in Nottinghamshire.

The area around the Gloucestershire villages of Dymock, Preston, Kempley and Oxenhall is known as the “golden triangle” because of its Wild Daffodils and Daffodil Weekends and Daffodil Teas are held there in mid March. The area was served by “The Daffodil Line” (the Ledbury and Gloucester Railway) between 1885 and 1964 and in spring there were Sunday excursions to see Wild Daffodils. It is sad that the railway has gone but good to see that the bus service for the area is still known as the Daffodil Line.

Outside the British Isles, Narcissus pseudonarcissus is a native of Belgium, France, Germany, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain and Switzerland. It has been introduced into other countries in eastern Europe, North America and Australia.

“All the taverns may be seen decked out with this flower”

In 1581 Charles de l’Ecluse noted that the Wild Daffodil “grows in such profusion in the meadows close to London that… in Cheapside in March the country women offer the blossoms in great abundance for sale, and all the taverns may be seen decked out with this flower” (note 2). 

John Gerard (c1545 – 1612) thought that Wild Daffodils grew in “almost euery where through England” and Richard Mabey notes that the Wild Daffodil was “one of the most widespread, common (and commonly picked) spring flowers until the middle of the nineteenth century” when numbers declined in much of central and eastern England in particular (note 2).

Wild Daffodil’s natural habitat is in ash and oak woodlands, bracken stands on scrubby banks and in old pastures (especially damp meadows). Habitat loss was a major factor in the plant’s decline. Picking removes the flowers but wouldn’t otherwise harm the Wild Daffodils. Digging up bulbs is another matter.

Wild Daffodils, Narcissus pseudonarcissus, at Great Moulton church. 27th March 2023.

The Wild Daffodils in Hethel and Great Moulton churchyards will have been planted.

The Flora of Norfolk (1999) says that Narcissus pseudonarcissus is “rare as a true native, but also occurring as an introduction especially in churchyards”. An earlier Flora (Petch and Swann 1968) says that “the truly wild daffodil is rare in Norfolk; the only recent records are from the Broads district… and at meadows at Hethel, where it has been known for many years”. A 1975 supplement to this flora tells us that Benjamin Stillingfleet recorded Wild Daffodils in flower at Stratton Strawless on April 1st 1785 (note 3).

Wild Daffodils have a number of English names, including Lent Lily, Easter Lily and Lenten Lily (because of the time of flowering), Daffys and Daffydowndilly.

The Welsh name is Cenhinen Bedr (Cennin Pedr), which translates as ‘Peter’s Leek’. A subspecies of the Wild Daffodil, Narcissus pseudonarcissus ssp. obvallaris, is known as the Tenby Daffodil. Its flowers are a uniform darker yellow and it is mainly confined to South-west Wales. Daffodils (especially the Tenby Daffodil) have been adopted as the national flower of Wales and are associated with St. David’s Day (1st March).

The scientific name, Narcissus, comes from the Greek myth about the young man who fell in love with his own reflection in a pool of water, becoming so obsessed that he fell in and drowned.

Admire but don’t eat…

Narcissus pseudonarcissus is a member of the family Amaryllidaceae. I’ve previously written about its relatives Three-cornered and Few-flowered Garlic (April 2021), Society Garlic (August 2015) and Babington’s Leek (January 2012), all of which are edible. But daffodils are poisonous – as is the related Snowdrop (which I wrote about in February 2012).

Daffodils contain the toxic alkaloids lycorine, galanthamine (also spelt galantamine), homolycorine, and tazettine and the toxic glycoside scillain (scillitoxin) (note 4).

Daffodil bulbs have sometimes been mistaken for onions. This usually results from someone not paying enough attention, for daffodil bulbs don’t smell of onions. (It’s important to use all your senses when identifying plants!)

Visitors to The Poison Garden in Alnwick shared their daffodil poisoning stories with John Robertson. One person poisoned herself and her dinner party guests; she didn’t bother to switch on her garage lights and accidentally grabbed some daffodil bulbs instead of onions. An au pair used daffodil bulbs by mistake when preparing a family meal. A couple were accidentally poisoned by an aged aunt – the woman suffered from nausea, vomiting and diarrhoea for two days after eating half a bulb but the man ate a whole bulb and was sick after ten minutes and recovered fully (note 5).

Not all poisoning is accidental: a dentistry student was convinced he was going to fail his exam, which would have forced him to end his studies. He deliberately ate a daffodil bulb before the exam and began vomiting after half an hour. He left the examination room and was allowed to resit the exam at a later date when he was better prepared (note 5).

Whether they are eaten raw or cooked, symptoms of Narcissus poisoning include dizziness, stomach pain, nausea, vomiting and diarrhoea shortly after consumption. Trembling, convulsions and paralysis can occur in more severe cases (note 6).

The stems or leaves are sometimes mistaken for various types of Allium. Eating just a few daffodil leaves can cause vomiting, but complete recovery normally occurs within a few hours (note 6).

In 2015 Public Health England wrote to major supermarkets to warn that the flowers could be confused with onions or Chinese vegetables, and consumption of them was an “emerging risk”. It was suggested that daffodils should be kept separate from fruit and vegetable aisles. The warning was repeated this February by the Botanist James Wong.

Daffodil bulbs also contain oxalates (like Cuckoo Pint), which are like microscopic needles, causing severe burning and irritation of the lips, tongue, and throat when swallowed. To quote James Wong: “Daffodils are filled with microscopic crystals, so biting into one is like swallowing a box of tiny needles. Properly nasty”.

Picking daffodils regularly in large quantities can cause contact dermatitis from the sap. One Twitter user reported “I used to work on daffodil farms down in Cornwall harvesting both the flowers and the bulbs. I have scars on my hands from sap seeping around the rubber gloves that we had to wear“.

Dogs and cats that drink the water from a vase of daffodils can show mild symptoms of poisoning. Non-human deaths include cattle fed on daffodil bulbs (in the Netherlands in the Second World War when food was very scarce) and a tortoise that ate a few leaves, became constipated and listless and died after 11 days (note 6).

There is increasing interest in some of the compounds found in daffodils for their cytotoxic, antibacterial and antifungal properties and action as enzyme inhibitors (note 7). Galanthamine is an acetylcholinesterase inhibitor and shows promise in alleviating the early symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease.

Notes

Note 1 – The genus Narcissus is described on pages 953 – 959 of the “New Flora of the British Isles“ by Clive Stace (Fourth Edition, 2019).

The genus Narcissus can be divided into 12 divisions depending on flower shape, colour and number of flowers on a stem. A thirteenth division is used for “Daffodils distinguished solely by botanical name”, which includes species of Narcissus such as the Wild Daffodil, Narcissus pseudonarcissus. The American Daffodil Society website has some good pictures of flowers in the various sections.

Note 2 – All this information comes from pages 425 – 433 of Richard Mabey’s “Flora Britannica” (Sinclair-Stevenson, 1996).

Charles de l’Ecluse was a Belgian Botanist, better known as Carolus Clusius, (1526 – 1609).

Note 3 – Gillian Beckett, Alec Bull and Robin Stevenson, “A Flora of Norfolk”.  Privately published, 1999. C.P. Petch and E.L. Swann, “Flora of Norfolk” Norfolk and Norwich Naturalists’ Society, 1968.
E.L. Swann, “Supplement to the Flora of Norfolk”, F. Crowe & Sons Ltd, Norwich, 1975.

Note 4 – From pages 20 – 21 of “Poisonous Plants and Fungi – An Illustrated Guide” by Marion Cooper and Anthony Johnson, HMSO, 1994 and Y. R. Boshra, J. R. Fahim, A. N. E. Hamed and S. Y. Desoukey (2022), “Phytochemical and biological attributes of Narcissus pseudonarcissus L. (Amaryllidaceae): A review“, South African Journal of Botany, Vol. 146, pages 437-458.

Note 5 – John Robertson (2010), “‘Is That Cat Dead?’ and other questions about poison plants”. Book Guild Publishing, Sussex, England.

Note 6 – Pages 20 – 21 of “Poisonous Plants and Fungi – An Illustrated Guide” by Marion Cooper and Anthony Johnson, HMSO, 1994.

Note 7 – Two recent examples are:

J. J. Nair and J. Van Staden (2021), “The plant family Amaryllidaceae as a source of cytotoxic homolycorine alkaloid principles“, South African Journal of Botany, Vol. 136, pages 157-174.

A. Lubbe, B. Pomahacová, Y.H. Choi and R. Verpoorte (2010), “Analysis of metabolic variation and galanthamine content in Narcissus bulbs by by ¹H NMR“. Phytochem. Anal., Vol. 21: pages 66-72.