Looking for a movie to watch this morning on Netflix with a happy ending (it has to have a happy ending) I am struck that this is why I love Spring so much: it’s the happy ending. All the pain, the trials, the hard work and sheer slog of the previous year are resolved, in one lovely burst of colour and freshness and beauty.

Our daffodils are blooming, at last. There are several hundred of them, and each year my long suffering husband Tim plants a hundred or so more. They’re everywhere. Inspired by a picture of Tasha Tudor’s daffodils, I, too, started ordering “The Works” from White Flower Farm, and we now have enough daffodils that I can pick them for the house, and you can hardly tell where I picked them from.

I do still have “Thalia” in the White Garden, and “Mrs. R. O. Backhouse,” a lovely pink daffodil, in the front garden, but other than that, I have renounced named varieties in favour of the wild display, all over everywhere.

I bought my brother “The Works” for his birthday, and he planted them all neatly in beds. He got an enormous display, and the pictures were lovely, if a bit like dozens of bridesmaids standing in a crowded lift, but the wild look is something special.

I have tried some of John Scheepers’ random daffodil mixtures, and they are good, but the bulbs are not as large as White Flower Farm’s. They are, however, less costly. Daffodil bulbs, like garlic bulbs, start out one clove, and gradually grow and divide. Eventually you get what would be a head. The flowers bloom larger and larger and then the bulb divides underground into several smaller ones, and the following year, each of the new bulbs sends up flowers. This is how they naturalize. White Flower Farm’s mix is mostly the larger ones, just poised to divide, so that they come up quite large the first year, whereas others I’ve bought are the smaller ones, that have just divided, and they take several years to reach the larger size.

If you cut a bulb in two lengthwise, you will see the small daffodil, all curled up neatly, all ready and waiting for Spring, to grow and push through the earth and take on colour.

The deer do not eat them, Daffodils, unlike Tulips, are poisonous and for this mercy, I am extremely grateful.