Roswell has an abundance of old houses – some in the public domain, some events venues and a very few that are private. I was invited to one of those private gardens last week to view the daffodils with Sarah Van Beck, a historic daffodil specialist. Old gardens are one of my passions, along with the people who made them and this one was a delight. Gardens mature over the years, and change when fashions change but the basic structures remain, and little things like spring daffodils can tell a lot about the poeple who planted them. Apparently daffodils are always planted by humans because they are too heavy to be carried on the wind, and animals do not eat them, which leaves humans. Sometimes the seeds fall close to the mother plant which is why some daffodils naturalise and some are relocated along with soil when digging holes but most are just where people put them.

So when you see a bunch of daffodils in an old lawn, there is a good chance that  the Victorian who lived there a century ago wanted the spring color right there. Sarah was there to add the dates to the flowers and record what was there.

Then we walked over the road to Barrington Hall where the ‘Jonquil Hedge’ was in full bloom’ – well as much as it was going to be this year. From the same theory of someone planted them there – we have a daffodil hedge that was planted in about 1870 and in full bloom in 2010. The strange parts where the ones in the spirea hedge itself. It is doubtful that people did that, but there are records of the original hedge being  hawthorne which may have extended further, or perhaps the spirea was planted when the daffodils were dormant we don’t know.