Dilly-Dally Over Daffodils No More

With more than 26,000 to choose from, it can be agonising deciding which narcissus to grow. Charles Quest-Ritson asks daffodil doyenne Christine Skelmersdale for ideas.

NOTHING beats daffodils as a symbol of spring. Their yellow cheerfulness tells us that winter is gone and will not come again. Even if their flowering coincides with snow or frost enough to flatten their stems, they pick themselves up again as soon as temperatures rise.

Deciding which ones to grow isn’t easy: there are 26,000 registered cultivars. ‘It’s best to choose those ones that have been given Awards of Garden Merit (AGM) by the RHS,’ says Christine Skelmersdale. ‘They will be weatherproof, garden-worthy and hold their flowers well clear of their leaves.’

No one knows more about daffodils than Christine, who’s run Broadleigh Gardens, the mail-order nursery for small bulbs, for more than 40 years. Her advice is founded on growing 250 different cultivars in her Somerset garden, seeing narcissus species in the wild and spending more than 30 years as a member of the RHS Daffodil & Tulip Committee, as well as testing thousands of new daffodils in the RHS trials and mounting innumerable gold-medal-winning exhibits at Chelsea and other shows up and down the country.

Christine never meant to be a nurserywoman. Having read geography at university and trained as a teacher, she went out to work in rural Zambia. There, she met a handsome young Englishman called Roger Bootle- Wilbraham and married him back home in England in February 1972.

Roger was a fully trained professional horticulturist and wanted to start a wholesale nursery in Somerset to grow winter-flowering shrubs. However, the opportunity came along, in May 1972, to buy a well-established nursery business, founded by Alec Gray, that specialised in dwarf narcissus.