…And then my heart with pleasure fills, and dances with the daffodils. —William Wordsworth
Ginny Neil
When I was a teenager my mother determined that her children could use a little more refining. In addition to insisting that we all attend cotillion, she decided to prepare us for the moment, as she put it, “that we might be invited to eat dinner with the president.”
Sunday dinners were our training grounds for this far-flung possibility, and in addition to learning to eat fried chicken with a fork and knife, our mother determined that memorizing and reciting poetry would provide us with topics for stimulating conversation should the need arise.
Therefore, Sunday afternoons found the three of us frantically scanning poetry books for something to recite so that we would be allowed to learn to spoon soup away from our mouths. My brother and I always opted for the shortest poem we could find, but my oldest sister took the high road. She memorized poems by Robert Frost and Emily Dickenson. Thus, the day I stood, drew a deep breath and in one long exhalation repeated William Carlos Williams’, “so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens,” my sister rose and serenely recited all 154 words of William Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.”
Ginny Neil
I was mesmerized by the startling image of “a host of daffodils as continuous as the stars.” I decided that one day I would create a field like that, so the first fall after my husband and I moved into our new house, I started “Project Daffodil.” When the last autumn leaf swirled down, I planted 50 daffodil bulbs on the hill that shoulders up against the yard. Each fall since then, I have added to the collection.
That first fall, I spaced the bulbs out over the whole field, and the display the following spring was disappointing. Two acres of hillside freckled with 50 daffodils isn’t very showy. In fact, they were hard to spot unless you knew where to look.
The second fall, I dug big holes and put a dozen bulbs in each. That effort yielded lots of greens and few blooms. The third fall, I tried tossing the bulbs over my shoulder and planting them where they fell. By some stroke of luck, the next spring the sunny blooms were framed by my bedroom window and I could watch them dance from the comfort of my bed.
From that point on, I planned my plantings around specific viewpoints. I also learned to plant bulbs in drifts of color, so that they flow naturally across the landscape. Daffodils planted against the dark edge of the woods are especially cheerful, and bulbs with differing bloom periods extend my daffodil daze for three to four weeks.
My acres are still more bare than bawdy with color, but this fall, I added 200 more bulbs. And, the ones that have been on the hill since I began are naturally spreading to fill empty spaces.
If you want your own field of flowers, now is the time to do it. I have planted bulbs as late as January, when there was a thaw, but late fall is better. Dig holes about six inches apart and four to six inches deep, drop in your bulbs, root side down, cover them up, and prepare for joy.
I hope one day, to wake and gasp in surprise at 10,000 daffodils tossing their heads in sprightly dance on the hill outside my bedroom window. After that, I’ll go admire the red wheelbarrow glazed with rain up near my chicken house.
Although I’ve never had the opportunity to recite a poem to the president, my life has been mightily enriched by the words my mother encouraged us to learn. She died last November, and the swaths of gold, lemon, cream and orange daffodils dancing on the hill have taken on new meaning. They are a testament to my mother’s love and will always remind me of her gentle coaching as she steered us toward social grace on those long-ago Sunday afternoons.
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The story above appears in our Nov./Dec. 2018 issue. For more like it, subscribe today or log in to the digital edition with your active digital subscription.