Help with identification — WWY-YYO large-cup

Hello all!

This one should be easy. My records indicate that this is April Queen, but I don’t believe it.

Also, it’s not Flower Record, that’s for sure.

Any ideas, Mr. Delaney? (!)

-Matt Duddy

1 comment for “Help with identification — WWY-YYO large-cup

  1. Commercial growers dumped a lot of these types of daffodils on the American nursery market back in the 1960’s. Notice this WWY-YYO is not going to be a very good landscape daffodil except in the perfect year. Although it multiplies well, even the foliage is mostly drooping leaves, large petals, heavy flower on a super weak stem that with the first heavy rain storm will kink and be bent over and laying flat on the ground in a day or two normally. I may actually have several thousand of that particular cultivar that was rescued from a construction site by my brother back in 1968 in Nacogdoches Texas. There was a white haired lady who had a row of about 10,000 bulbs that had multiplied over the years after she had planted a single box of the bulbs many years before?

    Back when that was dumped on the market they were not going to list that as a WWY! Not any premier daffodil breeders were going to use that in a breeding line, maybe other than to carry on the intense color. This is going to be something probably older than Franciscus Drake, much, much older than Barrett Browning but probably in that same breeding line prior to these.

    There were a tremendous number of bulb fields that were bull dozed during World War II, bulbs that survived the devastation of this period were rescued from along the edges of fields and drainage ditches. Then they were lined out and even weak necked daffodils would have made it into the cut flower trade. Europe was desperate for any export trade with America. Cheap aviation gasoline, thousands of obsolete military cargo planes and stripped down bombers were abandoned by the USA, then sold for scrap metal prices. These were outfitted for hauling cargo and plane loads of “cut flowers” arrived along the east coast cities of America. By the late 1950’s and 60’s commercial growers were dumping tons of these types of really reject daffodil varieties into the landscape type market. As they now had access to thousands of new seedlings. Chipping of newer bulb varieties with taller and stronger stems led to rapid improvement in the cut flower trade. Many of these droopy necked, short stemmed daffodil varieties would be replaced with types like Ice Follies, Unsurpassable, Fortune that had 16 inch tall stems while still in the “pencil” stage.

    Even Flower Record was only popular for about 12 years in the USA nursery retail bulb trade. In the south that intense red-orange in the cup sunburned to nothing after a couple of days. It was strictly a flower that looked good only under constant drizzly rainfalls or heavy cloudy days. You cut those flowers before the sun would shine on them to retain any red color. Back in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s only about 40% of a named pallet load of daffodils was going to be the correct name on the boxes! As late as the 1980’s full boxes of daffodils in the mom and pop nursery centers would have about 60% of the daffodils that even matched the color codes of what was supposed to be in the boxes. Think about what year was the first ADS daffodil show in Pennsylvania. Why would there be any reason to sell to the general public the correctly named daffodil. The danged daffodil flower is/was only going to last for about 8 days fully open) Keith Kridler Mt. Pleasant, Texas 120 miles due east of the Dallas Fortworth metroplex some 6 million people in DFW. We have about 40 active Texas Daffodil members over the course of a year out of a state population of about 24 million. We are the same latitude as Bengasi Libya.

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