Gardeners, walkers and lovers of the outdoors will have noticed that things are starting to happen in flower beds, on hillsides and along river banks. The snowdrops have come (and, in some cases, gone) and the olfactory blunderbuss that is the wild garlic will soon be announcing itself with gusts of onion-y whiff and carpets of verdant green shoots. But those with a particular penchant for a certain spring-flowering bulb of the genus Narcissus will be well aware that we are also entering daffodil season.
And nothing says spring like daffodils.
Memorialised in verse by Lakeland poet William Wordsworth (you know the one: “I wander’d lonely as a cloud” etc.) and co-opted by our Celtic cousins as the national flower of Wales – happy belated St David’s Day – the daffodil is also perfectly at home in our more northerly climes.
And how. One of the most comprehensive collections anywhere in the UK can be found at 16th century Brodie Castle near Forres, traditional home of the Brodie family. Here you’ll find over 100 varieties bringing a wash of yellow (and white and red and orange) to the grounds.
There is a reason why Brodie Castle is pre-eminent in the world of daffs. Major Ian Brodie, the 24th Laird, caught the daffodil bug in 1899 and began cross-breeding from an initial collection of 49 bulbs. Returning wounded in 1902 after seeing action in the Second Boer War, he threw himself into his hobby and soon had over 500 seedlings from several hundred cross-breeding attempts, cultivating his plants in a walled garden at the castle. Today only 116 cultivars still exist there, though that’s plenty enough for "a host of golden daffodils" (Wordsworth again) to appear every year. The castle has six flower beds given over to them, each one 45 metres long by 10 metres wide. Each produces around 70,000 bulbs.
Brodie’s legacy may have made Brodie Castle a mecca for daffodil lovers, but the historic tower house and its expansive grounds don’t have a monopoly on the flower. Next month at Backhouse Rossie, a walled garden at the Rossie Estate near Auchtermuchty in Fife, you’ll find Scotland’s Daffodil Festival. Held over the weekend of April 9 and 10 it offers sight of some 20,000 plants, including the scented Wordsworth variety.
Well, there had to be one named after him, didn’t there?
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here