cloud planting/naturalizing of daffodils

Keith Kridler Mt. Pleasant, Texas Very few folks who show daffodils are going to be heading out and planting a “cloud” of daffodils. We all need to be able to have a system or records that makes it easy to keep all of the different varieties separate but also named correctly.
Our fields here at my house are WAY too flat to create anything but concentrated “drifts” or swathes of daffodils and to make a show from a distance it literally takes hundreds of thousands of daffodils per acre “depending” upon how far away a person is going to be viewing a particular “drift or swath” of blooms!
The BIG issue with daffodils is that the cheaper varieties are older and have a shorter bloom season, normally you are lucky in many areas to have “peak” bloom for just TWO weekends with a single variety of daffodil.
Few people have the money or the stamina to go out and plant a cloud of daffodils that would cover a few acres all at once for just this short of a bloom season. Depending on where you live you might buy and plant thousands of bulbs only to find out that the variety you bought and planted will NOT survive at your location!!!
The steeper the slope where the daffodils are planted the closer together the bulbs need to be planted as the differences in height of the bulbs and blooms will make it appear they are further apart. Think about the differences in a large meeting room where all of the chairs are on a flat floor, then the seating at a movie theater and then the seating at the double height spacing of seats at an Imax theater. You need to be able to “see” EACH and EVERY face in a daffodil planting or you wasted the time, money and effort to plant those bulbs!
Botanical gardens lay out plantings to be viewed from multiple locations. Take photos of an area to be planted from all of the different locations and then over lay these photos with cut outs of colored translucent plastic to get and idea of what it would look like.
Daffodils are short and close to the ground! Colors need to be blended up higher into the photos by mixing in flowering trees and or shrubs that bloom at the same time as the daffodils. Swathes of native perennials help fill in gaps in colors and or bloom times!
Shade from trees then becomes an issue as daffodils need lots of direct sunshine to re-bloom year after year! Tree roots ALSO become a problem as planting daffodils in between tree roots is a nightmare! Bulbs tend to multiple and digging clumps of daffodils back out of the tree roots is next to impossible!
You plant daffodils normally in the fall and before you plant you would want to be able to mow the fields down to nearly bare soil or “scalp” the field with a mower. Thus you can “scatter” bulbs and NOT lose any in the grass as there would NOT be any tall weeds at planting time.
Depending on the types of grasses you have where you want to plant a cloud you might find that grasses and weeds or wildflowers get too tall too quickly in spring for there to be time for the bulbs to mature and make enough food to bloom in the following years.
Rye and Fescue grass are horrible in daffodil plantings as are any of the vetch species. Many clovers come up too thick for daffodils to multiply and or even mature. Since you cannot mow off the foliage of daffodils the weeds that mature at the same time as daffodils will tend to multiply more and more quickly each year as you are selecting these weeds that compete with the daffodils:-)))
For me planting large numbers of daffodil bulbs is a religious experience. I spend day after day, week after week each year down on my knees planting bulbs and praying to God for the strength to get all of the bulbs back into the ground before it rains or gets too cold to finish planting for the year:-)) KK

1 comment for “cloud planting/naturalizing of daffodils

  1. Excellent Keith. 

    Clouds or drifts of Naturalized daffodils as Keith said is hard to make and takes thousands of bulbs.  But you can make smaller clouds or drifts also.

    Our house in Maryland that was part of the garden tours at the 2004 ADS National Convention in Tyson’s Corner, VA.  It’s  about 25 miles away from the conventions site and has a small entrance with the large spread more than 400 foot from the road.  Those on the tour bus saw my small drift of daffodils at the entrance.  The property entrance is on a hill located on a road at a Cul D Sac, and one has to go down the slope toward the creek to the house.  On top of that hill I have about 75 feet of space across the lot, so I built the drift with Ice Follies, parallel to the road on those few feet.  In front of the Ice Follies I planted a number of miniature daffodils, Little Beauty, Tete-e-Tete and an unknown 1Y-Y miniature that Marie Bozievich had planted everywhere in her garden.  Mixed in to the planting are Barrett Browning and Reginald’s Early Sensation on the left side of the drift with “Churchill” and  Fragrant Rose in the middle front and N Poeticus on the right, all planted in a large “spread out” clumps.  There are flowers there from February until now (May).  The best View is in the middle of April.

    The rows of mixed miniature starts at the entrance of the Cul D Sac and made like an “S” Curve around to and down our driveway.  It really is an optical illusion with the miniatures and the secondary daffodils expanding the focal point and making it look like there is more there than there really is.  But from the road it looks like a cloud or drift of daffodils (but small) as the hill slopes away with the trees and the house behind it.  I only used 1000 Ice Follies in the cloud. 

    Our house is called the “Daffodil House “ in the neighborhood.  When we meet new people or neighbors that we haven’t seen for a long time it’s easier to tell them that we live in the Daffodil House than to try to explain where our house is located.

    Clay
    Clay Higgins
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