Bringing in spring with history in bloom

IN a garden below the mountain, at almost the windiest corner of the lawn, the first daffodils came into flower more than a month ago, their pert little goldentrumpets straining away from the final gusts of winter.

There's a special robustness, indeed, about the old farmhouse daffodils of coastal Connacht - a steely perseverance, for all their daintiness, that keeps them faithful to spring, come hail, come storm keeps them nudging up, sometimes, from close-bitten grass beside cottages long in ruins.

At a foot or less in height, the early daffs below the mountain are also among the smallest I have seen pale, crisp petals, with a twist, and a long trumpet, in a richer yellow, just fitting my little finger. If these are not actually "wild" daffodils, I don't expect to see any much wilder.

Yet, of course, they were planted, some 75 years ago when the stone house was built. Once, the friend who lives there lifted the bulbs to thin them out and reinvigorate their flowering. She found them packed together in several layers of corms - enough spaced out, to carpet half the hillside with daffodils.

"Rarely are wild daffodils in Ireland the true N. pseudo-narcissus." Thus the magisterial Charles Nelson in Flowers Of Mayo. This is the reprint, with Nelson's commentary, of Dr Patrick Browne's Fasciculus Plant arum Hiberniae of 1788 published recently by Eamonn de Burca. Dr Browne did not say where he saw his Mayo daffodils, but they were almost certainly growing among the trees in somebody's big estate, where, as Nelson says, "usually the plants are cultivars, or clearly derived from cultivars".

Ireland has a long tradition of daffodil breeding. There is even a celebrated daffodil garden, open to the public, on the wooded slopes of the New University of Ulster at Coleraine. It holds no fewer than 165 varieties, and commemorates Guy L. Wilson of Broughshane, one of the leading daffodil hybridists of all time.

That says much about Ireland's suitability for the tribe, but it is no guarantee that wild daffodils ever grew here unsponsored, let alone in the profusion of parts of Devon or Wales, or Wordsworth's Lake District.

Even the old Irish names - bleachtain, the milky flower (from the days when meadows were rich with herbs and milk quite yellow with cream), or lile an earraigh, an echo of England's "Lent lily" - are no indication that N. pseudo narcissus ever made it to Ireland on its own there are scores of plants in the British flora missing from this island's native flowers. In the northern counties, certainly, botanists are certain that what seem to be wild daffodils in demesne woodland, scrub and roadside hedgerows are forms that have escaped from gardens.

In that event, what is the origin of the old small-farm daffodils of Connacht? Most, indeed, must be naturalised strains of turn-of-the-century cultivars - the bulbs sold, perhaps, at fairs and bought with egg-money by wives longing for something pretty in the muddy surrounds of the house. In an unfenced garden menaced by the hungry livestock of early spring, a bulb which put up leaves and stems full of an emetic alkaloid was one of the few flowers likely to survive.

Today, of course, as new bungalow gardens are planted from the nearest garden centre, the farmer's wife buys gaudy Dutch narcissi like everybody else. It's the folk from Dublin, with their unimproved holiday-cottage gardens, who are likely to find themselves the guardians of the last "wild" daffodils in Ireland.

These could be wonderfully multiplied, with a little effort - if not, perhaps, quite on the scale of the 10-mile Daffodil Way created a few years ago between the villages of Dymock, Kempley and Four Oaks, in Gloucestershire. As Richard Mabey describes it in his new Flora Britannica, Dymock once drew Londoners 100 miles in special weekend trains to walk among the fields of wild daffodils and buy bunches at farm gates; the new path leads visitors through orchards, woods and meadows, with hosts of Lent lilies on all sides.

PICKING wild flowers, even on a near-commercial scale, seems to do little harm. This scarcely concerned me when, as a boy on a bike, I rode out into the Sussex Weald to loot the woods of primroses and bluebells: a great shock of limp stems drooping over the handlebars. Picking bluebells, says Mabey, "is a pointless exercise, given-how lifeless they look in a vase". I agree with him now.

What really does damage is digging up primrose plants for the garden, or encouraging a market for native bluebell bulbs, illegally procured.

Growing up to think of primroses as essentially woodland flowers, growing on mossy banks in a moist and dappled shade, it was a revelation to find them growing so profusely here in the west on open roadside banks - basking in the sun, indeed, at the foot of the hedgebank round my acre. In the Burren, too, an Irish stronghold of the primrose, the primrose is plentiful on short turf, even in the brilliant spaces of high summit plateau.

The paradox is repeated in Britain. In the extreme west of the island, primroses thrive even on a cliffs and stone walls, but in the east of England they are almost exclusively plants of shady woods and banks.

Moisture has much to do with it: the crinkled leaves of the primrose are made to conserve every drop and carry it down to the roots. In the west, the water loss from the soil of hedgebanks is balanced by higher rainfall. And even as woodland plants, primroses certainly do not shrink from light. Oliver Rackham, in his history of woods and their flora, notes how the coppicing of trees can bring a sudden, hundredfold explosion of primrose flowers in the first direct sunshine the plants have seen in years