Daffodils

And here come the daffodils, early bloomers lighting up the woodland paths in all their super-charged yellow glory.

These ones (I think!) are Narcissus Jetfire, their orange trumpets sexting like mad. As they sway in the breeze it feels like you’re watching spring once more bursting into life.

Few capture the scene of a swathe of daffodils ‘dancing’ in the wind as vividly as Dorothy Wordsworth, writing in her journal at Grasmere. Her description provided inspiration for her brother William Wordsworth’s poem ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’, composed two years later.

‘When we were in the woods beyond Gowbarrow park we saw a few daffodils close to the water side, we fancied that the lake had floated the seed ashore & that the little colony had so sprung up – But as we went along there were more & yet more & at last under the boughs of the trees, we saw that there was a long belt of them along the shore, about the breadth of a country turnpike road. I never saw daffodils so beautiful they grew among the mossy stones about and about them, some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness & the rest tossed and reeled and danced & seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the Lake, they looked so gay ever dancing ever changing. This wind blew directly over the lake to them. There was here & there a little knot & a few stragglers a few yards higher up but they were so few as not to disturb the simplicity & unity & life of that one busy highway – We rested again & again. The Bays were stormy & we heard the waves at different distances & in the middle of the water like the Sea.’

— Dorothy Wordsworth, The Grasmere Journal Thursday, 15th April 1802