Going for Gold

The garden-visiting year may kick off with snowdrops, but it’s their successors, daffodils, that really begin to brighten up spring. The milky-white flowers of the snowdrops fade away to be replaced by narcissus in every shade of yellow from the palest lemon to golden buttercup as well as pristine, pure white. They flower from around mid-March into April, as the days are getting longer and the weather’s (hopefully) becoming more spring-like, so head out to admire one of the season’s most cheering sights.

In the wild

William Wordsworth, as we know, loved the ‘jocund company’ of a host of golden daffodils. When his daughter Dora tragically died, he planted hundreds of daffodil bulbs in her memory in a field neighbouring his home at Rydal Mount. The National Trust and it is a lovely place to while away half an hour or so. . At one of the poet’s former homes in the area, in Cockermouth, head gardener Amanda Thackeray has planted 7,000 daffodil bulbs, which will flower this spring to mark the 250th anniversary of Wordsworth’s birth. While you’re in the Lakes, you could also walk some or all of the , a 20-mile route around Ullswater, which even features a daffodil on its signposts. It passes through Glencoyne Wood, the very place where Wordsworth spotted the daffodils he immortalised in his poem, ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’.