The title says it all. Where I grew up, the daffodils were typically not out until May. Even here in Ontario, Canada, April is a better rule of thumb. What about Ireland?
I’m working on a song based on a Samuel Beckett poem. The first stanza -
Thither
A far cry
For one
So little
Fair daffodils
March then.
would seem to imply the double sense that the daffodils are marching ‘thither’ across the landscape, and that their appearance heralds the month of March. Am I vaguely right? Please confirm or deny…
Can’t speak for Ireland either, but I once went to London in March. Two days before I left Sweden we had a blizzard. When I arrived in England it felt like summer and there were daffodils everywhere in the parks.
I work beside St. Stephen’s Green in the centre of Dublin. It’s a beautiful day here so I just took a walk over to the Green and took the following pic.
Not really in the OP’s territory but as a data point, I’m in north Texas and the early-blooming varieties are over already! Late-blooming varieties of both daffs and tulips are going strong, though - they musta liked the unseasonable cold winter we had.
Many thanks for your responses - just to confirm, there’s nothing atypical about this year, is there? Unusually warm weather early on, something like that?
It’s just that whimsy is such a strange thing to find in Samuel Beckett’s work. It really does seem, though, that the image of an army of daffodils marching across the landscape as the avant garde of spring was what he was after.
Remember, the UK and Ireland get the gulf stream so are warmer than most other places on the same latitude. It’s common for daffodils to bloom in February in London.
This is what my university in North London looks like at this time of year; that might be the type of thing he was thinking of. But the ‘march then,’ besides being a pun, of course, seems to me pretty dismissive - looking at this beautiful sight, shrugging his shoulders and muttering ‘oh. It’s March, then.’
