2 
BARR’S Gold Medal Daffodils, 1903. 
Extract from “ The County Gentleman,” April 11th, 1903. 
“THE DANCES OF THE DAFFODILS. 
" Two English poets, and perhaps two poets only, are generally assoeiated with the daffodil— Shakespeare 
and Herriek. Books of ' familiar quotations' find room only for the beautiful lines in which the one poet writes 
that they ‘ come before the swallow dares,’ and those in which the other laments that they ‘ haste away so soon. 
(Do they, after all, ‘haste away so soon'?) But why is Wordsworth excluded from the company of Shake- 
soeare and Herrick? Neither poet writes as if he had seen daffodils as Wordsworth saw them ; you feel that 
both might have seen patches of daffodils, and have thought them beautiful, but that they did not feel about 
them as Wordsworth felt. Wordsworth saw great fields of daffodils : he was wandering, ‘ lonely as a cloud,' 
when all at once, 
“ ‘ 1 saw a crowd, 
A host of golden daffodils ; 
Beside the lake, beneath the trees. 
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze. 
Continuous as the stars that shine 
And twinkle on the milky way, 
Thej' stretched in never-ending line 
Along the margin of a bay : 
Ten thousand saw I at a glance 
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.’ 
** It is not everyone who can count on being so fortunate as Wordsworth, and on being able at some time 
in the spring to wander over mountain valleys and suddenly to see ‘ a crowd, a host of golden daffodils. Yet 
any Londoner can sec something very like that sight for himself, if he chooses to do so. He has merely to 
travel down to one of the great bulb nurseries near London, and to walk through the wide grounds, with their 
spacious beds and broad stretches of nodding daffodil and narcissus, to feel something of what Wordsworth felt. 
For you must be actually among daffodils, with d.affodils all round you, to know what a spell the presence of 
the hundreds of thousands of dancing flowers can cast. A distant view is nothing — merely a stretch of yellow, 
beautiful in itself no doubt, but you must be, so to speak, knee-deep among the flowers, to catch something of 
the pure gaiety of their spirit. 
“ ' The waves beside them danced ; but they 
Outdid the sparkling waves in glee ; 
A poet could not but be gay 
In such a jocund company.’ 
It is only a matter of an hour or so to get into the middle of such a strelcli of daffodils as one wishes Wordsworth 
could have seen. About a mile from Surbiton Station— hardly half-an-hour from Waterloo— lie the Ditton Hill 
Nurseries of Messrs. Barr & Sons— acres of daffodils of every size and kind and description, from huge 
ti'umpet daffodils like Venetian vases, down to the tiny little cyclamifieus, which looks at you rather like a 
frightened rabbit, or the Triandriis albus, of which the fanciful English name is Angel s Fears. Indeed, the 
number and the variety of the descendants of the Lent lily and the Poeticus (Pheasant s Eye narcissus) for all 
the splendid varieties which Messrs. Barr have put on the market go back at the last to these first parents, the 
Adam and Eve of daffodils— are almost bewildering ; it needs the eye of the expert to tell the infinitesimal 
differences between, the faces and the family expressions of the hundreds of cousins. Some, of course, have a 
distinction which makes a mistake in recognition even to a stranger impossible. 1 here is the Lord Roberts, for 
instance, a flower with a perianth of broadswords and a majestic yellow trumpet ; the Weardale Perfection, 
rather longer and of lighter colour ; and the Glory of Leiden, whose trumpet is veined and streaked with dark 
lemon upon light. All three are distinct, though their shape is of the same character, a glorified Lent lily. 
Nearer in resemblance to the Poeticus is the wonderful Lveifer, with a large while perianth and a short frilled 
crown of the deepest glowing orange ; the Bai'rii Conspicmis, lemon perianth and almost vermilion-tipped 
centre cup ; and the White Queen, whose perianth is white and her cup of the palest chrome a flowei foi a 
bride. There is the great spiky starlike perianth of the Stella superba, radiating from a bright yellow centte; 
the Duchess of Westminster, a lemon cup set in a large silver saucer ; and there are many more, of which, 
how'ever, there is not one more beautiful than the Madame de Graaff, pure white throughout, and with the 
stateliest of trumpets— a triumph of hybridisation. 
“Desiring deeply to fill youi garden next year with clumps of every daffodil you have seen, you refer to 
Messrs. Barr’s price list, and discover that each bulb of the Lord Roberts costs twelve guineas, and each bulb 
of the White Queen twenty pounds. You do not wonder when you get the explanation. ' How long does it 
take before the seedling flowers? How long between seed and flower ? — you ask your gu-idc. Seven eight 
years, if you are lucky,' is the answer. 'And how many seedlings satisfy you with their flowers what pro- 
portion do you, so to speak, accept and keep?' ' I should be satisfied with one really fine, distinct daffodil 
out of five hundred seedlings.' 'And how long docs it take before you can put anything like a large supply of 
a new variety upon the market?' ‘ From seed to market takes about fifteen years. After those short sentences 
you only wonder that it is possible to fill your garden with so much glory at the price asked for the bulbs already 
firmly established on the market. 
“ But it is not the single daffodils which are the great beauty of the Ditton Hill gardens ; it is the long pale 
fields, the ' freshening lustre mellow ' of the acres of merry flowers. T hat is the picture which remains. 
* 1 gazed — and gazed— but little thought 
what wealth the show to me hath brought : 
For oft, when on my couch I lie 
In vacant or in pensive mood, 
They flash upon that inward eye 
Which is the bliss of solitude ; 
And then my heart with pleasure fills, 
And dances with the daffodils.’ ” 
