DAFFODIL CONFERENCE AND EXHIBITION. 



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can be nearly matched wild in Italy ; a very large Daffodil 

 lately brought into notice from Castle Welland Park, County 

 Down, and named Countess of Annesley, is very like an enlarge- 

 ment of an Italian variety which I have. They may have been 

 introduced by the monks in the middle ages, who were the 

 herbalists of those times. We know how introduced plants are 

 found about the sites of old abbeys, and these religious houses 

 were generally branches from Italian head-quarters. Gerard 

 and Parkinson tell us of the medicinal virtues of the Daffodil, 

 and the monks of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, finding no 

 Daffodils in Ireland, would naturally bring or send for so easily 

 transported a plant from their head establishment. Something 

 of this kind may account for the prevalence of these fine forms 

 in Ireland. 



Western Europe generally, from the Atlantic to the longitude 

 of the Adriatic, is the native home of the Daffodil. I cannot 

 trace it south of Madrid in the Spanish Peninsula, or south of 

 Rome in Italy ; it may probably be found in Dalmatia, but I 

 have been unable to obtain it from further east ; it is said to be 

 a truly wild plant in Hungary and Transylvania, though not in 

 any part of Turkey or Greece. The cradle and the metropolis of 

 the species, as far as we can judge, would seem to be the 

 Pyrenees. 



The number of wild forms of Daffodil which are distinct in 

 size, form, colour, and habit is very large, and every year is 

 adding to our knowledge of them. Little has yet been done to 

 classify them, or to distinguish between these and varieties of 

 cultivation. The laborious investigators at the beginning of this 

 century, such as Haworth and Herbert, worked to a great extent 

 in the dark, describing the forms they found in cultivation, but 

 often knowing nothing of their history. It is much to be de- 

 sired that some enterprising young botanist would make this his 

 special study, doing for the Narcissus what Mr. George Maw has 

 done for the Crocus,' visiting the varieties in their own home, 

 and collecting and recording all existing wild forms. The 

 trumpet Daffodil alone would require perhaps two hundred or 

 three hundred specimens to illustrate fully all its wild varieties, 

 but before all the specific distinctions of Narcissus are quite 

 lost by hybridising in cultivation, giving rise to endless confu- 

 sion, something of this sort ought to be done. 



