DAFFODIL DEVELOPMENTS. 
229 
DAFFODIL DEVELOPMENTS. 
By Rev. J. Jacob, F.R.H.S. 
[Read May 16, 1916 ; Mr. W. B. Cranfield in the Chair.] 
Were both the lecturer and his audience botanicaliy inclined, it would 
be impossible to fix any limitation, other than the beginning of time, 
to the period from which Daffodil development might have taken 
place. However, as we are met together as gardeners, we need not 
spend time in going back to the days of the Ark to inquire what 
were the daffodils Mrs. Noah had upon her table during her long 
period of incarceration ; or even to the times of the ancient Greeks, 
who made funeral wreaths for their dead of bunch-flowered Daffodils 
(Narcissus Tazetta) in the century before the Christian Era ; nor yet 
to Mohammed, who later still said " He that hath two cakes of bread, 
let him sell one of them, for bread is only food for the body, but 
Narcissus is food for the soul." 
As gardeners — as British gardeners, as practical people — who have 
the decoration of our homes and borders " back and behind " our 
coming here this afternoon, we do not want to hear too much of 
either the scientific or the historical sides of our flower, and yet one 
feels that, if nothing is placed before you which can be compared with 
the beautiful forms and varieties with which most of us are nowadays 
more or less familiar, there are few, except those who are conversant 
with old gardening books, who would appreciate the enormous changes 
that have taken place in the shape, size, and colouring of the Daffodil 
within the past ninety years. 
It so happens that by a happy chain of circumstances there seems 
to be a natural date which one not only may, but which one is 
practically compelled to take as the starting-point or period when the 
Daffodil became recognized in a very special way as a denizen of 
English gardens. 
I allude to the era of John Parkinson (1567 to about 1650), who is 
best known to fame as the author of the " Paradisus," or, to give the 
book its English title, " A Garden of all sorts of Pleasant Flowers." 
This man was a distinguished horticulturist and looked upon a garden 
with the eyes of a garden lover, and not, as his profession of apothecary 
in those days might lead us. to suppose, as being prima facie a home for 
medicinal herbs. He made a speciality of the Daffodil, and in forty odd 
pages of his folio tells us how he collected them from different parts 
of Europe and elsewhere ; how he cultivated them ; and how he 
raised his own seedlings. This book was published in the year 1629, 
