DAFFODIL CONFERENCE AND EXHIBITION. 



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identity of which there is any direct evidence in print was a 

 double Daffodil. It was raised by John Parkinson in his London 

 garden, and is called the " Double Spanish Bastard Daffodil " at 

 page 103 of his " Paradisus in Sole," wherein he thus speaks of 

 it : "I think none ever had this kind before myself, nor did I 

 myself ever see it before the year 1618, for it is of mine own 

 raising, and flowering first in my garden." At page 104 he 

 further says of it : "It is risen from the seed of the great 

 Spanish single kinde, which I sowed in mine own garden and 

 cherished it until it gave such a flower as is described." This 

 extract is worth quoting as showing that seedling Narcissi 

 really were now and then reared by the early seventeenth cen- 

 tury gardeners. As to hybrid Narcissi, they do not appear to 

 have been artificially produced in gardens until a much later 

 date ; but that they were produced naturally in the native 

 habitats of the Narcissi then, as now, is too w T ell established to 

 be for a moment doubted. Varieties of hybrid origin are 

 figured by several old authors, and in such works as De Brys 

 and Sweert's " Florigelia," in the " Theatrum Florae," in the 

 still earlier " Jardin du Boy," and at least one or two are rudely 

 illustrated by Parkinson himself. In a word, man had in 

 Herbert's time only just begun his apprenticeship as a marriage 

 priest in the garden, but the bee and the butterfly had been 

 busily improving the world's wild flowers for thousands upon 

 thousands of years, and these insects must be credited with 

 having made the Narcissi a puzzling study long before any of 

 the now numerous garden hybrids appeared. 



I believe I am right in saying that the first hybrid Narcissi 

 artificially reared in English gardens were produced by the late 

 Hon. and Bev. William Herbert (afterwards Dean of Manchester) 

 at Spofforth in Yorkshire. In the Botanical Begisterfov August 

 1843 several of these hybrids are figured and described. One 

 variety, which he tells us is the result of crossing the wild York- 

 shire Daffodil with pollen of N. poeticus, is a form of N. incom- 

 jMrabilis. Another is the produce of N. incomyarabilis, fertilised 

 by the pollen of N.poeticus, and is called N. SpofforthicB, a plant 

 most nearly represented nowadays by De Graaff's seedling named 

 N. Burbidgei " Little Dirk." 



Other curious instances might be brought forward, but it will 

 be better for those most interested to read every line Dean 



