Sunday, February 17, 2008

Summer Daffodils, Who Knew?

Last night, against my better judgment, I cracked open the shiny new Breck's catalog for a little looksie. It seemed a perfectly harmless thing to do, despite my spring-fever-weakened-state, because while Breck's has many tempting lovelies, their prices have always been expensive enough to cancel out my temptation.

My browsing started out innocently.... Gladiolas and Oriental Lilies, yawn. The Lily Tree was interesting, because of its massive size, but isn't something I'd want in my garden. I paused on the Venus False Sunflower, but only to consider looking for its seeds. I kept flipping non-chalantly through Amaryllis, scores of Dahlias and some Begonias. Then I turned to the magic that is page 19 and read three beautiful words. Three words I'd only dreamed of reading before: Summer-Blooming Daffodils.



Can it really be true? Is my all-time favorite flower, the lovely daffodil, not really limited to a brief spring showing? I turned to my trusted friend Google for answers (and to try and find these lovelies for a cheaper price!), but I found little. Most sites directed one back to Breck's. Whose site has few details on summer daffs.

Michigan Bulb's site offered a small bit of explanation as to why I'd never heard of summer daffs before:
These daffodils are unusual because of their summer flowering tendencies. Extremely nice fragrance. Developed in 1951, but only recently brought into mass-cultivation.

But Vesey's Canadian site dashed my hopes a bit by claiming that Summer Cheer (Narcissus'Erlicheer'):
The fragrant flowers appear in June or July the first growing season, then in the spring in subsequent years.

If they only bloom in summer the first year, what's the frickin' point?

I can't find any gardeners who have written about summer-blooming daffs online. I need non-commercial confirmation or denial of these summer-blooming daff claims. Has anyone grown these lovelies?

I might just have to buy some and experiment. Purely in the name of research of course. Luckily, the Breck's catalog has one of those lovely, but evil, $25 off a $50 purchase coupons.

5 comments:

  1. I too have been tempted by those! I love our daffodils, but always wish they would last longer.

    Hope your experiment is a success and summer daffodils are real. :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi, Thanks for visiting my blog and leaving a comment. I see you love cats too, and that you live in Ohio.
    I have 3 dear writer friends who live in Ohio, and add in two more in Texas and we six writers will have our first book published this October: Scrapbook of Christmas Firsts.
    Love your blogs/pix on bulbs.

    ReplyDelete
  3. argh! I have been pondering on these Summer Blooming Daffodils and just getting ready to order them today when I came across your post. THANK YOU! for that one important line about only blooming in summer the first year... I guess we have two options 1) Treat these as annuals and buy a new supply to bloom each summer, 2) put on hold our dreams of a true summer blooming daffodil ):

    ReplyDelete
  4. I know your post is old, but I just now came upon it. I bought and planted these in Feb 2008. They came up but never bloomed that year. They came up in the spring of 2009 - after all my other daffodils had bloomed, but no buds ever formed. They died back as all others do, and they came up again in November and they are now about 5 inches tall. All my others are also popping up right now since we had a cold spell the first of Nov and then warm again the end of Nov--and much, much rain!! And now it is in the 20s and 30s for the last two weeks so I'm sure they will be killed when it gets to single digits this week. Will see if they ever bloom . ..

    ReplyDelete
  5. last week our group held a similar discussion on this subject and you illustrate something we haven't covered yet, appreciate that.

    - Laura

    ReplyDelete

Comments make my day! Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts.

Note: Comments are moderated in order to keep this a spam/ad-free forum.

LinkWithin

Blog Widget by LinkWithin