Plantwatch: Under attack – the wild British daffodil

Spring went off with a bang in last weekend's sunshine as blossom, flowers and new leaves burst out, although everything was about a month behind normal. But now even bluebells began to open this week over much of southern England, spurred on by the warm weather.

One of the great harbingers of spring is the daffodil and they made a good show, but these are largely garden varieties. The wild British daffodil is much smaller, about six to nine inches tall, with pale yellow outer petals cupped around a rich yellow trumpet, and set off against silvery-backed leaves. The flowers also have the uncanny knack of all pointing in the same direction, bobbing up and down in the wind like a crowd at a rock concert.

Wild daffodils were once common but these days are confined to only a few regions in England and Wales where they grow in glorious profusion. Best known is the Golden Triangle on the Gloucestershire-Herefordshire border around the villages of Newent, Dymock and Ledbury, where so many people came to admire and collect the flowers that a Daffodil Express train service was run in the 1930s. Collecting the flowers did not harm the plant population, and why the wild daffodils went into a steep decline elsewhere in the mid-1800s is a mystery. But now the biggest threat to the wild plant is hybridising with the garden daffodil, which is being increasingly planted in the countryside, and which produces a much larger and rather ungainly hybrid.