6 JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



summer and the profusion of its fruits. Most fresh and fragrant 

 are the allusions to them in the older poets, who have drawn their 

 inspiration from the fields and woods. In Broome's M Daphnis 99 

 we read— 



"The joyous spring draws nigh! Ambrosial showers 

 Unbind the earth, the earth unbinds the flowers, 

 The flowers blow sweet, the Daffodils unfold 

 The spreading glories of their blooming gold." 



The Daffodils may be said to comprise the whole of the Narciss 

 family, but John Parkinson warns us that there be true and false 

 Daffodils, and at page 67 he gives the rule to distinguish them. 

 "Now to cause you to vnderstand," he says, " the difference be- 

 tween a true Daffodille and a false is this, it consisteth only in the 

 flower (when, as in all other parts, they cannot bee distinguished) 

 and chiefly in the middle cup or chalice; for that we doe in a 

 manner onely account those to bee Pseudonarcissos, bastard Daffo- 

 dils, whose middle cup is altogether as long, and sometimes a little 

 longer, than the outer leaves that doe encompasse it, so that it 

 seemeth rather like a trunke or long nose, than a cup or chalice, 

 such as almost all the Narcissi or true Daffodils have." 



Thus the Narcissi are brought before us as Daffodils of two 

 sorts, the true and the false, the classification so far resting on the 

 relative length of the trumpet, cup, or crown to the sepals and 

 petals, or, as we say to look learned, the perianth segments that 

 encompass it. 



The Narcissus takes its name from a blooming youth, son of 

 Cephissus, who, being beloved by Echo and a crowd of nymphs, 

 turned aside to make love to his own shadow in the fountain, and 

 achieved immortality by meeting death in the sparkling stream. 

 From his delicate corse sprang the beautiful flower which for ever 

 wears around its heart a blood-stained girdle of remembrance. It 

 is the fair white flower with ruddy annulus, known by distinction 

 as the Poet's Narciss, or Narcissus poeticus, that represents the 

 story, although Ovid, who gives it in detail in the third book of 

 his " Metamorphoses," certainly does suggest that it might be a 

 yellow flower, and a veritable Asphodel. But we must not be too 



