East Lodge bLog

Daffodils

Daffodils

Hello!

Well sorry I missed Wednesday! Soolie and I have swapped so I’m here Thursday 2-5pm today instead! I walked in in the rain, dodging puddles on the canal towpath and when the hood on my coat was insufficient I took out my umbrella and felt rather ridiculous as I negotiated the mud. A couple of ducks looked at me curiously and a few lambs frolicked in the field across the canal.  Their conversation of quacking and bleating was very entertaining. I turned off the canal to go down to the Riverside Walk and by now the rain was falling in huge raindrops, getting heavier by the minute and I was beginning to wish I had brought the car: “When all at once I saw a crowd, a host, of golden daffodils” and I was transported to the back end of last summer when I met a gentleman with a wheelbarrow full of bulbs in the very spot.  He was planting what must have been hundreds of daffodils meticulously working his way down the path.  I stopped to talk to him and he told me that he took great delight in planting copious quantities of daffodils every year and he was slowly building up the line along either side of the path.  Not quite “Along the margin of the bay” but along the margin of the path down to the river.  Today the daffodils were waving and bobbing with the rain, but their bright colour was a cheery sight.  I was intrigued because the William Wordsworth poem conjures up an expanse of wild flowers, haphazard and free, whereas here it was as if the path had been drawn with a yellow brush and the promise of more stretching out as far as I could see the path.  The flowers themselves were varied and amazing, perfectly yellow, and as you would expect a daffodil to look, but in amongst them were strange hybrids with orange centres, ruffled double petals, pale tangerine, paper thin white trumpets all heralding Spring!

Easter card by Hilary Roberts currently exhibiting at East Lodge.