262 The American Flower Garden 



them for bread is only food for the body, but the narcissus is 

 food for the soul." Surely we cannot do less than the heathen ? 

 But if, after we have sold our bread, we have not enough coin 

 in our purse to buy a quantity of daffodils at the regular rates, 

 what then ? Approach a florist who forces them under glass on 

 a large scale for cut flowers only. He needs fresh bulbs for forcing, 

 but the old bulbs that he is glad to sell you at a bargain, if put into 

 the ground as early as it can be worked in spring, recover their 

 strength and bloom gloriously the following year and probably 

 ever after. There is a field in New Jersey where the daffodils 

 that once surrounded an old garden have been multiplying without 

 anybody's care for over a hundred years. 



Three distinct types of narcissus, each class with seemingly 

 innumerable representatives, bewilder the novice who would make 

 a choice. First there are the hardy yellow daffodils, both the 

 single long trumpeted ones and the double forms with many 

 yellow petticoats overlapping; second, the white or yellow flowered, 

 fragrant type to which the poet's narcissus and the sweet-scented 

 campernelle and jonquil belong; and third, the Tazetta type, with 

 many flowers on a stem, most commonly represented by the 

 Chinese sacred "lily" grown by many Celestials in bowls filled 

 with pebbles and water in their laundry windows. The class last 

 named has not afforded hardy bulbs for the garden until recently. 

 Now, both white and yellow flowered ones true polyanthus 

 narcissus may be safely grown in the open ground so far North 

 as Boston. The name narcissus, though the botanical title of 

 the whole family, is popularly applied only to the small-cupped 

 species; and the name daffodil, in popular parlance, has come to 

 include all the members of the family with long or medium 

 trumpets. 



