Today's Flowers: Grace Garden

I had to go to Durham, NC last week and while I was there, I took a few minutes to check on the early blooms in Grace Garden.

Although most of the early blooms had been zapped by the cold weather last weekend, a few individual clusters of narcissus were making a comeback.

Daffodils are pretty resilient and this garden has a lot of different varieties.

Although I sometimes use daffodil and narcissus interchangeably, daffodil is an English common name used for flowers in the genus narcissus. I used to think it was only used for some of the flowers in that genus but I have a different take on that after researching it.

I used to think that narcissus were a specific variety and daffodils were another variety. According to the American Daffodil Society: The two words are synonyms. Narcissus is the Latin or botanical name for all daffodils, just as ilex is for hollies. Daffodil is the common name for all members of the genus Narcissus, and its use is recommended by the ADS at all times other than in scientific writing. The ADS has 13 descriptive divisions for daffodils.

One reason I'm not sure about always calling this group of flowers daffodils except when using scientific names is that common names vary in terms of regions of a country and in different countries. In some ways I think it makes as much sense to call all of them narcissus since they are all in that genus. The cluster of daffodils below were all damaged by the cold but I still think they look pretty.

Most of the hellebore were bent way down and had folded up like the ones below.

I did spot one white hellebore that was open and healthy looking.

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