Extract from “ PALL MALL GAZETTE,” April 21st, 1886. 
THE HOME OF THE DAFFODIL. 
“ Innocent and sentimental people might think that the home of the 
daffodil is to be found where Spenser places it, ‘ on the watery shore,’ 
where 
Narcissus on the grassy verdure lies ; 
or where Keats spied them, when 
In some delicious ramble he had found 
A little space with boughs all woven round ; 
or where Wordsworth wandered lonely as a cloud, 
When all at once he saw a crowd, 
A host of golden daffodils, 
Beside the lalce beneath the trees, 
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze. 
Tho real home of the daffodil is in none of these fabled spots : it is in a 
field near Tooting, fifteen minutes’ walk from Earlsfield station, on the 
South Western Railway. Some centuries ago more was known about 
daffodils in Holland than in England, and the old herbalists of Queen 
Elizabeth’s time constantly refer to the ‘ Pyrenaean mountaines ’ as the 
region from which the greatest number of varieties of the ‘ Spanish 
trumpet,’ as Evelyn calls them, had been obtained. At the present time 
it is notorious that in no part of the world is to be found so vast a collec- 
tion of the many varieties of the narcissus tribe as in a commonplace two- 
acre field, near Tooting, whose ‘ flowering squares ’ are now waving with 
every shade of yellow and white, from the giant Princeps to the slender 
and delicate Triandrus, a plant which, from its likeness to the snowdrop, 
is sometimes called the snowdrop narcissus, and to which the Portuguese 
have, in their language, given the pretty name of the ‘tears of the angels.’ 
It is not generally known that the daffodil is one of the most ancient of 
English flowers. None have been introduced from America, Australia, or 
remote China or Japan. So early as 1629 John Parkinson, the apothe- 
cary of King James, in his work on the ‘ Garden of Pleasant Flowers,’ 
gives long lists of the then known varieties of this plant, sixty or seventy 
in number, which he recommends in the most affectionate language to the 
gardeners, and especially to the gentlewomen of England. At this period 
there was a burst of enthusiasm for the daffodil tribe. It subsided, how- 
ever, in due course, and if we accept the fact that a double daffodil, of 
a pale and somewhat formal type, was named after Queen Anne, there 
was little sign of any interest in narcissi until the beginning of the present 
century. From 1800 to 1830 the daffodils had another innings, under the 
auspices of three celebrated botanists — Herbert, Haworth, and Salisbury. 
After this date the flower foil out of fashion again. Such varieties as 
were mentioned in catalogues got inextricably mixed up, and it was not 
until twenty years ago that Mr. Barr, whose famous collection at Tooting 
we are now visiting, began to classify and rearrange them. First, he 
collected all attainable wild varieties from the various countries where 
they grow — Spain, France, Italy, and Great Britain ; then, in 1874, he 
got together a syndicate who bought up a collection of seedlings 
