Daffydowndilly, Lent Lily, the harbinger of spring

I never saw daffodils so beautiful they grew among the mossy stones about and about them, some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness and the rest tossed and reeled and danced and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the lake, they looked so gay ever glancing ever changing.
Dorothy Wordsworth, Grasmere Journal April 1802

The next plant group that I mention has to be the Daffodil. We have suffered such a long and dark, cold and bitter winter and now spring is being kept held at bay.  So much so that the Daffodil Festival in Thriplow, over the weekend 20/21 March, was widely publicised by the press having fun at its expense, because very few of the daffodils were in flower as it started. They are blatantly still 'feeling the cold' and keeping themselves for a few more days.


This genus has vast hordes of people writing about it, so I am concentrating wholely on the plants we all consider to be common daffodil, despite that being a somewhat complicated idea.  The literature is comprehensive.  I will acknowledge 2 major sources for this blog post.  Alice M Coats performed a remarkable feat in her works on the history of garden plants.  Narcissus appears in Flowers and Their Histories, published in 1956.  Penelope Hobhouse is also a major figure in the research on plants in garden history and published Plants in Garden History in 1992.  In 2002 a book was published by Taylor & Francis edited by G Hanks; Narcissus and Daffodil: The Genus Narcissus as part of a series on medicinal and aromatic plants.  It is on order so I cannot make direct reference to it for this blog post, but there are a couple of comments that I make that have been triggered by its publicity material.

Daffodil or Narcissus?  Both names have origins that may be myths.  Of course it is more scientific to use Narcissus, but Daffodil has long-standing charm and poetic celebration.  They both describe plants that are more diverse in colour and form than those with which the names are immediately associated in popular culture.  Both names in fact originate from the white rather than the yellow form of the plant.  Narcissus is known to be a Greek word and for many years it was thought this was inevitably linked to the myth of the youth tricked into looking into a still pool and seeing his own beautiful reflection for the first time, falling in love and turning into a (white) flower.  The truth is more intriguing, since it comes from Narce according to Pliny in 320BC, which 'betokeneth nummedness or dulnesse of sense', from the intensity of the aroma from the flower.  What makes this intriguing is that eastern daffodils have been found to contain quantities of Galanthamine – a narcotic chemical used in the amelioration of dementia and Alzheimer's.  Daffodil, or daffydilly as Shakespeare had it, is a corruption of Affodyl, in itself based on Asphodel, another often white plant!  The reasons for this connection have yet to be explained.

In the UK, wild daffodil (Narcissus pseudonarcissus) is primarily a woodland plant, behaving in a similar fashion to bluebell but normally flowering earlier in the season.  It often flowers on the First of March, which made it an obvious alternative to the leek for St David's Day adornment.  The period of its peak flowering during Lent in most years led to another old name being Lent Lily.  The wild plant is fairly small with the trumpet cloaked by the outer petals, rather than 'set off' by them as we know in the cultivated form that is so much more abundant.  The photograph was taken by Simon Davey.

There have been two phases of intense interest in growing daffodils in this country.  The first was between the mid 16th and mid 17th centuries as bulbs were collected from the hills of Europe and cultivation began to throw up new hybrids and varieties.  The Iberian peninsula is especially important for the introduction of Narcissus hispanicus, the Great Spanish Daffodil.  This magnificent plant is tall and erect with a proud bright yellow head and is one of the key ancestors for the 'common daffodil' we all think we know so well.  In 1597 Gerard listed a dozen plus different daffodils in his Herball.  Thirty years later Parkinson listed 78.

After this period of activity it all went very quiet and many of Parkinson's list went out of fashion and ceased to be available.  This may have been from a combination of factors that included both changes in the design and layout of parks and gardens that took place in this period, as well as the fall in temperatures that accompanied the Little Ice Age.  The next period of daffodil-raising began about 1837, leading to the widespread travels of Peter Barr (called the Daffodil King) who was able to refind many of the species lost since Parkinson's time.  Since his time the daffodil has gained a substantial place in the hearts of all, with numerous hybrids between yellow and white, multiple stemmed varieties and double-flowered heads that I personally have enormous affection for, but which require copious amounts of water and luck to maintain a stem strong enough to hold the heavy heads.  The Royal Horticultural Society have a Daffodil Register and Classified list from 2008 that contains 27,000 different plants identified as of garden origin up to June 2007.

What struck me very forcibly as I was putting this together was the timing of the two periods of intense cultivation compared to the penning of the lines which have made the daffodil so much a part of our cultural heritage.  Wordsworth went for his walk with his sister Dorothy exactly in the period in which the daffodil was out of favour.  It was to be a further 35 years before the  resurgence of interest began.  I then re-read the lines written by Dorothy in her Journal and thought their description more suited to the wild daffodil than those whose photograph is often put alongside reproductions or quotes of the poem.  Apparently it is widely known among botanists that he was describing wild daffodils, but it came as a surprise to me.  In fact there is a bit of concern about the health and future of the very plants he described, in 2002 the National Trust announced that they are worried that some garden variety plants that have appeared nearby may be hybridising with the Ullswater plants and that they are carrying out research to establish the origin of the new plants and come up with what to do next.  It is with a wry smile that I think of the Poet's Daffodil (otherwise called the Pheasant's Eye Daffodil) also being the white form, an incredibly beautiful plant that has been grown in cultivation for centuries, easily pre-dating Wordsworth, for whom it was never named, of course.

Daffodils herald the spring for us in such a glorious and flamboyant sunniness, encouraging joy and hope even under dark wet conditions.  Snowdrops are an appropriate beginning but we need that yellow for our hearts to lift to meet the rays of the sun.

Appreciating Lichens...

...Till there rose, abrupt and lonely,
a ruined abbey, chancel only,
lichen-crusted, time-befriended,
soared the arches, splayed and splendid,
romanesque against the sky....            
John Betjeman, Ireland with Emily.

A landscape friend of mine has asked me several times to do something about lichens, which I feel a bit shy about doing.  I am a landscape architect married to a lichenologist.  It isn't often that venturing into subjects that you know many people who know the material better than you do is particularly sensible, so I have resisted her suggestion each time she has made it.  However, lichens are a part of all of our worlds and the international lichen community is in the process of selecting their top 100 lichens.  This has started me thinking about how I would address that as a landscape architect, and not as a lichenologist.  Lichens come in all manner of shapes, sizes and textures.  They grow on all manner of surfaces, which now include my car following a couple of years of dusty summer PM10 deposits building up in crevices of windows out of the reach of the car wash.  Many of the current great lichenologists have a profound love and in-depth knowledge of tiny little dot lichens that most people wouldn't even notice. Landscape architects are more likely to prefer the more showy lichens....  (In fact the emerging list contains many very beautiful lichen species and I will add a link to the full list when it is available in the next few weeks).

The key surfaces upon which lichens grow are: rocks (saxicolous), trees (corticolous), wood (lignicolous), soil (terricolous), moss (muscicolous), other lichens (lichenicolous) as well as leaves (foliicolous) and even metal (metaliferous).  Almost all of these surfaces are ones that we work with in landscape design or management.  Graveyards are the most obvious places where people can see lichens growing and which generate a great deal of reaction to their presence.  Lyrical poetry has been written on the relationship of lichen covering to the concept of age, and occasionally it is linked to the idea of decay, which is not at all fair.  Some churchyards go to extraordinary lengths to 'clean' the churches and memorials of their lichen covering.  It is known for new stones to be polished to resist lichen cover, which is a shame and has given many modern graveyards a stark and aggressive character, with each letter etched deeply and embossed in gold leaf.

In cities such as London, until about 30 years ago, most lower plant cover of monuments, walls and trees came in the form of a dark green alga mixed with soot.  It was ugly and it felt as though everything needed a good wash.  This was due to the very high levels of industrial and coal- based pollution.  It is amazing to consider that in some cities now the air pollution levels have sunk below those of the countryside which is awash with nitrates from fertiliser.  Work being done on air quality by OPAL is showing very clearly the increase in pollution-sensitive lichens colonising urban centres, with decreases also showing in rural areas as nitrate levels increase (more information here).  OPAL is an initiative run jointly by the British Lichen Society, the Natural History Museum and Imperial College, London.

Lichens can give valuable details about the health of an area, urban or rural.  There is a lovely simple grey lichen that can tell if a piece of woodland has been under continuous canopy for over 400 years just by its very presence.  It is highly sensitive to change in management.

There is a brilliant and flamboyant yellow splat of lichen that announces very graphically where birds or dogs have 'been'.  It thrives on nitrates and is also very keen on airborne particles of nitrogen compounds that can build up in the nooks and crannies after a period of dry weather.  This can mean that it will grow on small twigs in preference to the main bark of a tree.  Almost all lichen names are in Latin only.  This lichen is called Xanthoria perietina.

I have had a long affection for and interest in the use of concrete because it is so ubiquitous and flexible in how it can be used.  Different surface textures can be designed into it, but it does have a poor reputation based heavily on the green alga that will grow on it as it ages, dulling a once bright surface, making it appear in need of tooth-whitening techniques.  I believe that it may be possible for us to design in ways to make this work.  In the 1980s there was a short fashion for architects to design their wooden cladding in office atria and the 'reconstructed stone' effect of the buildings' exterior to tie together.  Since this poncy name is basically concrete when used in a fine grain form it is very interesting that the inevitable streaking of the surface came to reflect the grain of the wooden panels indoors.  Some buildings and walls have had pig slurry or other compounds sprayed onto the walls to encourage rapid colonisation by lichens to mellow their look and imply age and robustness.

I have chosen a few lichens to comment further on:

Cladonia stellaris is an arctic species that doesn't occur anymore in the British Isles.  It is eaten by reindeer and moose, and is a major constituent of reindeer moss.  The relevance for landscape, apart from the utter beauty of its form, of course, is the history of its use for architectural modelling.  It is one of only a few species that were used traditionally in the depiction of trees around buildings.  I used to be able to buy bags of it for my college models.  It was often dyed varying shades of green, which softened the normal crunchiness of the growing organism.

A lichen that gets both lichenologists and members of the public equally excited is Lobaria pulmonaria.  This lichen has been given an English name, Lungwort, in the herbal tradition of health-giving properties showing in the visual form of an organism.  It was considered to be a powerful aid in the treatment of lung disease as a result of its very lung-like characteristics.  It is incredibly sensitive to air pollution and occurs in the best quantities in western Scotland and Ireland.  It does occur in pockets in England and is heavily protected by legislation.  In paintings by Constable of trees at Flatford Mill, he shows it as abundant on their trunks.  It has not been seen in East Anglia since the industrial revolution.

A sibling to Xanthoria parietina is Xanthoria aureola.  This is a coastal species also fond of bird droppings etc, but has a different character and form to its more widespread relative.  It is also more likely to be orange rather than yellow.

Many other lichens have siblings with different localities.  Ramalina farinacea is a widespread lichen often seen growing on twigs or fences. It prefers a good air quality.

Ramalina siliquosa, on the other hand, although with a similar form, is far more fussy.  Not only does it require good air quality, but it really needs that air to be salty and is another lichen with a range that is primarily coastal.  Strangely, it does grow on Wiltshire Sarsen stones, a fact that has not been easy for lichenologists to explain.



And finally....

When picnic tables come towards the end of their useful life it is not everyone who shuns them, by any manner of means.  As they age, their lichen community increases and so does the community of lichenologists who enjoy them.....


as well as having their own way of showing appreciation of paving...the next photograph was taken by Simon Davey on a field visit to the Netherlands.

For further information – the obvious site from which to begin - The British Lichen Society