Photo Shoot: April's Flower

It is prime time for the Cape’s most popular flower, the daffodil. A string of sunny mild days last week coaxed out the blooms. A road trip down the Old King’s Highway, Route 6A, from Barnstable Village to Orleans was like a journey down the Yellow Brick Road, minus the Scarecrow, Tin Man and little dog Toto. I was feeling a bit cowardly trying to sightsee and drive at the same time so I could have been a sub in for the lion.

Based on my single source gardening diary data, the daffodil peak season in 2024 is almost two weeks earlier than when my record keeping started almost 30 years ago. This is strictly observational information. Many of the area’s annual festivals celebrating the daffodil all arrive at the end of April, but now mid-month finds the flowers at their brightest. Last year on April 14, the temperature approached 80, summer in spring.

No matter the timing, the venerable daffodil always shows up to perform. We had a few around our house growing up, but it wasn’t until I arrived on Cape that I got the full story. My mother-in-law, a devout daffodil aficionado, gave my first tutorial on planting. Ignore the directions on the bag of bulbs, dig a round hole, shake in some bone meal and loosely clump all the bulbs together, cover with dirt, start another hole. This planting plan, now 40 years later, still delivers a reliable show. First the batch by the foundation, next up the ones around an old granite boulder in the middle of the yard, it was too much work to move it, and lastly the flower bed out by the street arrives to finish the show.

For the wayward gardener, this is the flower to invest in. According to the Boston Bulb website, daffodils have been around since 300 BC originating in the southwest of Europe. The site goes on to tell in Greek mythology a story about a man named Narcissus where the flower got its name. It is a flower that also presents endless photo possibilities. It can provide a wonderful frame to many of the Cape’s landmarks, windmills to lighthouses. But I find the closer I look the more there is to see, which is true of many wonders of the natural world.

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This article originally appeared on Cape Cod Times: Photo Shoot: April's Flower