Daffodils or Jonquils

If there’s a flower that heralds spring to me, it’s yellow daffodils. I learned to refer to these flowers with long noses as daffodils from my Illinois neighbor. Mrs. Futrell had a small white farmhouse with a white picket fence lined with the small, early yellow flowers growing under old-fashioned lilac bushes.

She would walk the fence line with her favorite milk cow and pick bunches for an old piece of broken blue crockery she kept on her butcher block kitchen table. Her homemade apple pie never tasted better than after school perched on a chair at that table decorated with that pitcher full of yellow flowers.

After I moved to Missouri, I noticed people here where calling what I called daffodils as jonquils.

Although my “daffodils” have started to fade, I still have what I call “jonquils” in my garden. They’re distinguished from daffodils by having several flowers on a stem, tube-like leaves, as opposed to flat leaves, and are wonderfully fragrant. In general, the flowers tend to be smaller, too and bloom mid-season.

When my mother moved to northern Illinois, my visits to Champaign-Urbana included weekends of landscaping her house. One morning, her neighbor Brenda brought in a bag of loose bulbs and asked if we wanted “narcissus” bulbs. Of course we said yes, then started to wonder what these bulbs were. When they finally bloomed, my mother said they looked like daffodils to her.

My mother was understandably confused. I had given her a pot of paperwhite narcissus one Christmas – popular white bulbs to force in an indoor pot and very fragrant – but the ones her neighbor had given her looked nothing like those.

Years later, working in Seattle one spring, a colleague with a fabulous flower garden brought me a lovely yellow bouquet of what she called “buttercups.” They looked like large yellow daisies to me but she said her grandmother called them a “host of buttercups.” These aren’t daffodils at all but ranunculus, a totally different flower family that has small yellow and white flowers with five separate petals in a daisy shape and bloom spring through summer.

Back in the Midwest, wild buttercups are a small, shiny, bright yellow flower that also blooms in spring, sometimes into summer, but they don’t have any long “noses” like a daffodil.

Not that it makes any difference to anyone, all the flowers are beautiful – but I decided to settle this once and for all.

The correct term – drum roll please – is “narcissus,” the term for the genus of bulbs that includes daffodils, jonquils, and paperwhite narcissus, among many others. Although scientifically these are at least 25 different species, one of the gardening books said the “common” term for the wide range of narcissus flowers is – daffodil.

By the way, Narcissus don’t really have “noses,” that’s just what I call the long “cup” or trumpet at the center surrounded by six petals. On daffodils, they are correctly referred to as trumpets.

Charlotte Ekker Wiggins is a beekeeper, gardener and sometimes cook. Published by El Dorado Springs Sun once in print and online with author’s permission. Copyright 2017, all rights reserved. This column may not be reprinted, republished or otherwise distributed without author’s permission. Contact Charlotte at gardeningcharlotte at gmail dot com.

WHICH IS WHICH? – Can you tell which ones are daffodils and which ones are jonquils in this vase full of flowers?

ALL DAFFODILS – The white flower is a daffodil; the yellow ones with two flowers per stem are jonquils. But you can call all of them daffodils if you want to do so. (Photos by Charlotte Ekker Wiggins).

Facebook Comments