Daffodils are signs of spring

I wander'd lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o'er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host of golden daffodils,

Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze. -- First stanza of "The Daffodils" by William Wordsworth

In the Bay Area, paper-white daffodils appear in December. That's right. On the shortest, coldest, wettest, darkest days of the year, when everyone in our house gets just a little bit cranky, daffodils appear in the garden to reassure us that the light will come again. This is cause for celebration. We pluck the perky flowers as soon as they appear and bring them into the house, where the warmth calls forth their heavenly scent.

Since you can never have too many daffodils, we planted a few hundred bulbs on a small hill (very small) in our garden, beneath an arcade of ancient California live oak trees. That's our "daffodil hill." The oaks allow filtered light all summer, just what the braided leaves of our spent daffodil plants need in order to put away food for next year's flowers.

We planted several varieties of daffodils -- early, mid, and late-blooming. When the paper-whites finish in early January, the next-blooming variety is just starting to blossom. So it continues through February and March.

We planted each daffodil variety in several clusters of 3-5 bulbs and spaced the clusters 2-3 feet apart. The bulbs "naturalize," multiplying each year and filling in the gaps between the clusters to form great swaths of color and texture across our daffodil hill. As the great English gardener Gertrude Jekyll advised, our daffodils "look happy and at home, and make no parade of conscious effort".

Wordsworth's "host of golden daffodils" no doubt refers to the iconic King Alfred daffodil, familiar to all for its huge golden trumpet and great surrounding collar of petals. Somehow, we neglected to include King Alfred on our daffodil hill. We have many colors of flowers -- yellow, white, orange, even pink. We have large and small, plain and ruffled flowers. But no King Alfred. Perhaps next Fall, when we add a new variety or two, King Alfred will be among them.