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Saturday, February 18, 2012

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.
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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.
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Daffodils are pretty resilient and this garden has a lot of different varieties.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Most of the hellebore were bent way down and had folded up like the ones below.
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I did spot one white hellebore that was open and healthy looking.
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Click for the home of Today's Flowers.

12 comments:

Sallie (FullTime-Life.com said...

I learned something from this post; sure thought they were two separate flowers. Beautiful pictures of my favorite flowers (whatever you call them) and ones I really miss because they don't bloom in Florida (and of course they'll be gone by the time we get back to Oregon).

Modern Mom said...

These photos are lovely.

Pink Serendipity

Luna Miranda said...

oh wow, these are beautiful! i thought narcissus and daffodil are one and the same.:p

gorgeous shots!

Photo Cache said...

thanks for educating about daffodils and narcissus. my daffodil is blooming, yay!

ewok

eileeninmd said...

I love daffodils, lovely photos Carver!

Cezar and Léia said...

Thanks for this lovely yellow energy, the daffodils are gorgeous!
Léia

Carolina Mts said...

I have many daffodils in the yard of all colors - thinks for the info here.

Rajesh said...

Beautiful flowers of very different colors.

Judy said...

I thought that the ones with the smaller trumpets were narcissus, and the larger trumpets were daffs! Whatever! They are beautiful, and I am so glad to see that spring is happening somewhere! We still have a fair amount of snow, and will get at least another couple of storms before we see any such lovelies outside...

Anonymous said...

Beautiful - we're normally about two months at least from spring flowers but with this crazed winter we've been having some of the bulbs have already started to grow!

i beati said...

already yay !1

Sandi McBride said...

Such beauty in February...our pear and peach and plum trees are starting to bloom...hope the cold doesn't get them!
thanks for sharing Grace Garden with us all.
Sandi