With their beauty and heady perfume, scented narcissi will raise the spirits on a cold spring day – indoors or out. Liz Potter picks her favourites
Think of daffodils and you can’t help but picture the bright yellow trumpets of Narcissus pseudonarcissus – our hardy native species. After a long dark winter, even gardeners who shun yellow flowers for the rest of the year will make an exception for these cheerful blooms by the time March comes around.
But, while N. pseudonarcissus can lift spirits and inspire Romantic poetry, there are about 70 other species and thousands of hybrids and named cultivars to consider too –many of them deliciously fragrant to attract pollinators and humans alike. Their trumpets (cups/crowns/coronas) and outer petals (perianths) come in single and double forms, in a palette of hues that include white, cream, primrose, orange and coral-pink, as well as lemon-yellow, which can help them fit in with more nuanced planting schemes.
Ideal as seasonal gap fillers in sunny, moist but well-drained beds and borders, you can also grow these versatile perennials in containers or a cut flower patch to harvest their blooms for the house. Or, plant their bulbs in a shallow bowl on the windowsill for forced winter flowers indoors, where the fragrant species will quickly fill the room with a sweet, herbaceous, floral scent.
For centuries, narcissus blooms have been harvested to make aromatic essential oil – used in India as a purifying balm to apply before prayer, and in Arab countries as an aphrodisiac and a cure for baldness! Narcissus Absolute oil is still extracted today from plants farmed in the Netherlands and in Grasse, in the south of France. Some of the world’s most commercially successful perfumes, including Guerlain’s Samsara, Givenchy’s Ystais and Dior’s Miss Dior, are based on their natural floral essence.
SENSATIONAL SCENTS...
Of the 13 official Daffodil Divisions, three are noted for their fragrance: the Jonquils (Division 7), the Tazettas (Division 8) and the Poeticus daffodils (Division 9). Jonquils are native to Spain and Portugal, and usually have between one and five sweetly fragrant flowers per stem. They’re frost hardy and have narrow, reed-like foliage. The cup is short, sometimes fluted, and petals are often flat, fairly broad and rounded, flowering in spring. The wild jonquil, N. jonquilla, has golden yellow flowers in clusters of six or more per stem. Heights vary from diminutive cultivars such as ‘More and More’ at H: 15cm to taller, knee-high ones such as ‘Sailboat’, at about H: 45cm.
Tazettas are n
