The Lone Daffodil

Have you ever really looked at a single daffodil?

Not a bank of them beneath an old tree, or a garden filled with yellow, but one daffodil growing alone.

The daffodils in my garden aren’t planted in clumps. They grow sporadically along a line and seem to flower separately, one after another. Maybe that is why I notice them.

For most of the year, the bulb has waited beneath the ground, sleeping and growing where no one can see it. Then, at the very beginning of spring, it sends up one stem. At the top of that stem, one flower opens.

One flower for an entire year of waiting.  It feels like a raw deal when you think about it, all that time beneath the ground for one brief flowering.

It may bloom for a week, maybe a little longer if the weather is kind. Or the spring wind may bend its stem and the rain destroy its petals before it has even had that. Then it is gone, and the bulb disappears beneath the ground for another year.

There is something almost agonising about a lone daffodil. Maybe that is why we plant them in clumps. A hundred yellow flowers look abundant and joyful; one looks vulnerable.

Do we gather them together because they look more beautiful that way? Or because the tragedy of a single daffodil is too painful to look at?

And yet that first lone flower is the one that tells us winter is nearly over. It appears while the garden is still bare. A small sign that the light has shifted and the days are slowly getting longer.

By the end of November, when you look back over the three months of spring, those first daffodils can seem so long ago. Spring has moved on without them. Yet the daffodil was there at the very beginning, offering its one brief flower before the weather was ready to be gentle.

I only realised after I had written this that tomorrow is Daffodil Day. It wasn’t consciously in my mind. This is simply something I think about each year when I look out my kitchen window and see those solitary daffodils appear in my garden.