Botanists introduce order and certainty into our lives. Yes, let’s order everything into a kingdom, genus, species, tribe. Let’s give everything a Latin name. Let’s decide if things are opposite or alternating, palmate, oval, serrated, or smooth.
Daffodils are of the plant kingdom. They are Angiosperms. Monocots. Asparagales. Amaryllidacaea, Narcisseae, Narcissus.
I recently went to the glass flower collection at the Harvard Museum of Natural History. Beginning in 1886, over three thousand flowers made of glass were created by Leopold Blaschka and his son Leopold. The flowers are anatomically correct. A botany professor needed to be able to show his students life-like representatives of plants that didn’t wither . Or in some prescient way, did people know that we humans might eventually destroy living things?
O daffodil, so yellow, the very essence of yellow, the very essence of spring, of poetry, of cheerfulness breaking into the sodden sameness of March. All right for Andrew Wyeth to like his November/March palette, his straw-covered fields, but I, for one, enjoy the bright yellow of daffodils.
Botanical ordering doesn’t get at the daffodil’s yellowness, the hope in its fragrance, or the way light shines through its tender yellow trumpet.
Come, March, march forward and bring us daffodils.
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