SEEDLING DAFFODILS. 



97 



It is because there is seldom a large pod that the seed is 

 unnoticed. A few seeds may not uncommonly be found in what 

 looks merely like the rather swollen end of the pedicel. I have 

 seedlings of the common " double Telamonius " now in flower, 

 and several other gardeners can say the same. Hybrid or crossed 

 doubles are not impossibilities. In 1885 I noticed the stigma 

 protruding from the tightly-double trunk of a few flowers of 

 double cernuus. I marked them, and obtained nineteen seeds, 

 eleven of which grew. Out of curiosity I dusted the stigma of 

 one or two with pollen from a yellow Ajax — I believe it was 

 spurius — which was growing near at hand. This spring one 

 of the eleven seedlings is flowering, and the cross was evidently 

 effectual, for the flower — so far as I could judge of it in its half- 

 opened state before I left home — is drooping, like cernuus, but 

 so yellow as to be almost precisely like the common double 

 yellow. The ten unflowered seedlings seem to vary in leaf and 

 habit, and I may have more oddities to report next year. It 

 may be of service to hybridisers to know that the pollen of 

 double Narcissi commonly gives doubleness to single flowers 

 fertilised with it. In my garden I have some clumps of the 

 common double yellow on a walled south border, which therefore 

 bloom early. In a batch of seedlings from "Tenby," sown in 

 1884, I have one quite double flower, differing in no visible 

 feature from the common double yellow or Telamonius plenus. 

 I understand that my friend Mr. Wolley Dod has had precisely 

 the same experience, and I do not doubt that in both gardens 

 insects conveyed pollen from the double flower to the single. 

 These seedlings have been grown in ranks and watched every 

 year, and no mistake has been made. Our common wild Pseudo-N., 

 when fertilised by pollen of the common double yellow, yields 

 single yellow seedlings, and also doubles of a small intermediate 

 character. Much then, I think, might be done to give us greater 

 variety in double Narcissi. I notice that Mr. G. Cornhill writes 

 to the Garden of April 6, affirming that he has two varieties of 

 "hybrid seedling Daffodils." 



It is well, however, to remind the enthusiastic gardener that 

 he is not likely to make a fortune out of the business of raising 

 seedling Narcissi. Not only must it take a large fraction of a 

 lifetime to work up a small marketable stock of a fine variety, 

 but he may labour some years without finding such a plant 



