It’s not often that one goes to bed reflecting on having saved a life, but yesterday was one of those days. (So much has happened since I sat and wrote this, that yesterday, it wasn’t) Or maybe it wasn’t just one life? Maybe two, or even three?

They were only sheep – ewe and lambs, but nevertheless, I always get a thrill from a successful lambing. In this case, Halloon, one of our older and therefore more experienced multiparous ewes chose just before lunch to begin her labour, on a wonderful cool, dry but sunny day. As we prefer, she was out in our steep field and after a short period with little progress, we opted to encourage her across the meadow and into the ‘green lane’ where our basic covered lambing pens are set up.

Having benign, calm sheep makes this fairly straightforward if we take our, and more importantly her, time. However, it was clear that part of the lamb was already outside Halloon’s body. Once in her pen, a quick examination showed the fair-sized lamb’s head was out but both front legs were still flexed back and invisible in the womb. There was no way this lamb was coming out without me feeling, finding and pulling out at least one of the legs. For anyone (maybe the majority of readers) who has never had their hand inside the warm, slime-filled cavity of a ewe’s uterus, it’s a strange physical experience. Every time, as well as the mental challenge of trying to work out what one can feel, I’m always conscious of just how delicate both the lamb’s limbs and uterine walls feel. Gripping the tiny slippery hooves and trying to pull them through the cervix and vulva was easier than in some cases, and once the whole foot and limb was safely into the open, a strong, firm continuous pull was sufficient to bring the lamb slithering onto the bedding.

Halloon instantly changed her vocalisation to grunting pig mode, as she started to clean off the lamb, whilst I helped with a towel. A quick spray of iodine onto the umbilical cord, and a check of the lamb’s sex, and the job was done.

Fiona managed to take some great videos showing just how quickly this first lamb, and his sibling, delivered with minimal fuss a few minutes later, began bleating and then staggered to their feet.

One of nature’s spring wonders, and still a mini-drama for us with our very small scale flock. Without such correction, Lennox would never have emerged alive into the world, and left in this state neither would Lewis, and Halloon would have succumbed too. Such are the risks attached to the marvel of mammalian conception, foetal development and birth. I still feel fortunate to be able to help with, and experience such events.

So far the lamb arrivals have a very skewed gender distribution – 3 sets of ram twins, just 2 single ewe lambs. As is our way, we’ve moved onto the letter ‘L’ this year to select names for them – daffodil cultivars for the ewe lambs, and this year more of a celebrity choice for the rams, but hopefully all easier to remember than last year’s battles with multiple unfamiliar ‘K’ named daffodils.

The previous week saw another small group of garden visitors from Kidwelly garden club booked in to arrive around 2.30pm. As often happens, we heard the first car pull into the yard about half an hour early. I greeted the guest who opted to stay in her car until others arrived, and the weather was warm enough for her to leave the windows open, and dry enough for me to do a bit of watering of potted snowdrops. It was on the third trip to the standpipe tap to fill the watering can that I glanced up into the hay meadow and couldn’t help myself exclaiming, really loud. “Bloody Hell”.  

(Many thanks to Fiona and her Smartphone for this, and several later photos where I was otherwise occupied).

Half way up the field was a llama. A huge llama. With a filmmaker’s fake perspective, and the distant shepherd’s hut just behind it, a seemingly enormous beast. We knew of no one who kept llamas locally, and had no idea how it had got into the field. This was one of life’s unexpected dramas that needed a very swift response. Made more pressing by the fact that another TV crew was shortly due to confirm a trip to make a feature piece about some of our daffodils, including the pride and joy of all those dainty dwarf forms which I’ve grown from scattered seed in this very same field. Just yards from the llama’s four large feet. Each one possessed of, unlike the cloven hooves of sheep and cattle, two toes with very large hard toenails. Click here for a clear comparison, explanation and photos of the differences.

A quick plan of action was arrived at. In rough order, I first apologised to the visitor for my language and pointed out the novel arrival. Next, I alerted Fiona who grabbed our 2 walking stick cum crooks and a pair of scissors, (for dealing with what I knew was a tied upper gate) and finally we asked our guest if she could manage car parking duties for the other impending car arrivals, while we raced up the field. We headed up with the plan of herding the llama towards the gate in the top North East corner. Fortunately, whilst wary, it wasn’t aggressive ( llamas have a whole host of strange behaviours!) – and this was a seriously large animal (I had no idea – never having been this close to one before) but they can weigh up to 250KG. I managed to outflank it and make it to the gate well ahead of it, cut the ancient knotted baler twine (we haven’t opened this gate in years) opened it, then retreated. Meanwhile Fiona had carefully kept at a distance below it trying to limit its potential for a quick downhill blast. It fell for the plan, spotted the open field higher up the hill through the gateway and trotted straight for it. At impressively fast llama speed. Apparently they can clock 40 mph, and watch this brief video for an idea of just how fast they can cover the ground – and avoid predators in their native mountain terrain.

Immediate crisis resolved, Fiona posted the details on the village community Facebook page, and discovered that the llama had been first sighted a couple of hours earlier on the road into the village from Llanybydder. No one seemed to know who owned it.

The rest of the club’s visit was fortunately drama free, and once again they enjoyed lovely weather. The llama hasn’t returned (yet!) but several days later the owner, who apparently lives several miles away still hadn’t shown up to capture it. Good luck to him with trying to keep this animal on his own land in future.

The following day, I’d paused at the top of the steep field below the hay meadow, having dragged up a bag of our own raked out purple moor grass bedding material, from the bottom hay shed. My eyes picked out the sun highlighting some long brown wisps of hair caught on the strand of barbed wire in the top corner of this field. This must have been where the beast jumped into our land. But this was a double fence it cleared. Not only that, but it jumped into a tiny roughly square bit of ground bordered by 2 gates, a sheep hurdle and the double fence. Having jumped in, it must have turned and jumped out at 90 degrees, with precious little scope for a run-up.

If I were the owner, maybe I wouldn’t worry so much about how he can possibly contain such a skillful jumper. Rather I’d be thinking laterally, getting a small saddle made and training and entering him (or her) for this season’s three day events. He’s clearly got huge natural ability. In all of this I’m making a gender assumption – the whole scenario played out so fast I had no focus on assessing this.

Finally, a couple of days after this I spotted some very strange damage to daffodil leaves in our malus/sorbus copse – another area likely to be filmed. Leaves that look like they’d been cut/chomped rather than broken by being trodden on. Daffodils are very toxic, but is this the result of a trial llama sampling? Thank goodness only a few plants were affected.

The real challenge for me of the last fortnight hasn’t however been this, or indeed another weekend of opening the garden to visitors, or even more lambing events – though they did impinge on the most critical 24 hour period. Rather continuing with getting up to speed on factual information about daffodils, since I was going to be grilled about this on camera, and would hate to have spouted something factually incorrect.

So as well as re-reading the 2 excellent books on daffodils which I mentioned in my last post, I did a lot of lateral research, prompted by the very many email requests from the programme researchers for information and with their ideas of what they’d like to cover. And winding up with yet more video footage taken by me, edited and then sent off to them, a couple of long phone conversations, and an hour and a half Zoom meeting with both the lead researcher and director. Finally, after a slightly delayed filming date due to uncooperative weather, a two and a half hour walk around the garden with the director on the afternoon before the planned shoot, which also happened to be an afternoon when we had NGS garden visitors to welcome and entertain. And indeed a day which began with a novelty – 3 of our imminent ewes had been restricted to the green lane overnight, because the previous evening at dusk we’d seen a fox rootling around in this area, 10 metres or so from the pens with ewes and lambs in. We figured that if a ewe did lamb overnight, safety in numbers might be an advantage – they normally take themselves away from the other ewes to find a quiet corner to ‘prepare’ to lamb.

I was greeted at dawn by a strong lamb, but 2 of the 3 ewes strongly claiming it as their own, and the lamb was definitely confused as to which was its actual mum. It took a while to sort this out, and Happy, the imminent older ewe who was trying to mother it kept bawling for the lamb for most of the morning, whilst her real mum, Jamage, was fortunately unfazed by this confusion once we had her safely in a pen with her lamb. Happy would deliver her own two lambs without fuss later in the day while I was otherwise occupied with our important visitor.

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Soft Goodnights

Tread gently through these soft goodnights,
Pull on tired boots, dim bright Clulites
Slow sweep the beam, find white paired eyes
Grounded, passively, prone – calm lies.

Likely, Laddy, Lenny, Larry,
Little Meg and daffodilled Lalique,
Lucky Lennox, sibling Lewis
Complete this tribe, mark days and weeks

Outside, (no bright lit lambing shed),
Bare mountainside, stars overhead
High canopy, comfort cocoon
Stop, stand, lone shepherd. Vast, still cwm.

Turn off the torch, with senses piqued
Nothingness delights, calm seeps and
Moves this soul, alone, till Jetfire creeps
Soft kefirred fingers, gently sniffed.

Such quiet communion, peaceful times,
Anachronistic links with those
Behind. Ahead? Who knows, who cares.
Plain words, plain scenes, plain lives, now shared.

28/03/2025

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The following day’s excitement ran from 8.15 am to around 7 pm, after which I could collapse in a heap. And began with a bit of a flap, as our last ewe decided to lamb just as I was welcoming the crew. Fortunately, Fiona was brilliant, assisting the delivery and coming to drag me away briefly to do our customary checks on the ewe’s udder, and then I held the lamb for Fiona to spray its cord with iodine. Only as I stood up did I notice my carefully chosen light coloured trousers had an obvious fine gold misting of iodine down one thigh.

Since the director decided to shoot some scenes with me feeding the ewes and lambs first thing, it meant changing into over-trousers and scruffy – but familiar to the sheep –  wooly jumper. Our ewes and older lambs, which only been put out into this field 2 days before, with the oldest lamb born just 2 weeks earlier, provided some star performances for both camera and drone. Even when, like me throughout the day, they were conned into having to reprise the scenes several times to allow different camera angles. I’m guessing there will be surge of interest in the Tor ddu breed of sheep, if many of these shots are included.

As for the shepherd, sprawling on the ground as I do to try to train the lambs from day one to be biddable, I was thus condemned to wear my scruffy over trousers and pullover for the whole of the rest of the day’s shoot, for continuity reasons. This, at least, was no surprise to me. And didn’t really bother me – as I told the crew, along with my tatty wide brimmed straw hat, (which I was regularly reminded to tip a little further backwards so they could see my face) it’s all part of my normal shabby, counter-cultural, rural, grumpy hobbit persona.

Quite how the crew managed to keep going over such a long gruelling day was beyond me, and Fiona did sterling work keeping us all going with drinks and nibbles when needed. As the last 2 to leave – the cameraman, and the director herself – were packing away their kit, I complemented them on their phenomenal focus (sorry) and sheer hard graft, and asked what drove them to still do this work with such commitment after many years (3 were in their ’60’s). It couldn’t possibly be just about money, I mused.

The answers were revealing – the cameraman said somewhat tongue-in-cheek, words to the effect that he had to work this hard to keep the director happy. Adding that with his huge experience (and we’d already learned that he’s recognised as one of the top in his field) the director was not only hugely experienced, but also the best in his experience at doing this type of project, and the one usually chosen when the words were coming from a ‘new’ presenter – like me. In turn her slightly longer response was that they were really lucky to travel to some wonderful gardens, meet passionate gardeners, and it was their challenge to be able to do them and their gardens justice, and to tell their story as well as they could. So they had to ensure they took as much footage of as many possible subjects from as many angles as they could.

Which of these same 4 views would you prefer, I wonder?

Better take all 4, and work it out later, maybe.

She explained the maths as well – 7 minutes, roughly, of final programme comprising typically 2 to 3 second clips, (as is the norm these days for attention spans -sic) means an awful lot of different excellent pieces of photography were required (maybe around 200?)

Having so recently had the other experience of another TV crew trying to distil the essence of garden and gardener into a few brief minutes on screen, and indeed with my own dabbling in the challenge of crafting short video pieces, I’d realised that this was the real crux of their task, particularly for the director. To work out the storyline they wanted to portray in advance of the shoot and then try to get the right footage which could be sliced and diced back at base, to portray this story to the viewers at home.

A major problem in this case being that they were relying on me as an over-tired ‘presenter’, who had to be constantly reminded to look at the director sitting just to one side of the long lens, and not into the lens itself. And then repeat what I’d just said when a loud vehicle spoiled the sound. Except I had no script. Or repeat when a plane flew overhead. Or I muddled my words.

So best to take lots of additional scenes without me, which could be added to the narrative and give scope for some back-at-base music to be worked into the piece.

They were helped by a stunning day of glorious sunshine and only mild Easterly winds – the day before, and the day after and much stronger winds would have wrecked filming. They also came at a perfect cusp of flowering times, managing to still just catch nearly all of the early season daffodils with a fair number of mid-season flowers emerging in the couple of days before they pitched up. Two days later and the chilling brisk winds were taking their toll of a few earlies.

I’m sure given the calibre of everyone who came, their very involved preparation and efforts on the day will enable them to craft something very special to showcase this place and its daffodils, even if the spoken words are a little confused at times. I’ve mused on the process, and why 2 TV shows have found us in quick succession in the middle of nowhere, and thought we’d make good ‘copy’. In big part I guess because of our on-line presence through this website and my YouTube channel.

But the next stage for the researchers was perhaps more difficult than usual.

Rather like the story of the Pfizer Papers (which I’ve finally managed to obtain as a physical copy through Blackwell’s, since Amazon steadfastly refuse to sell it to me – funny that, eh?), there’s an overwhelming amount of information from years of thought, writing and photography on the many pages and posts of this website. It’s a huge task to try to whittle this down and craft a story, (not just about daffodils, but about us and this place), as a ‘cold’ outsider with frankly limited time to grasp all the nuances of the people, time, and place. .

The 2 TV shows have clearly approached this in very different ways, with less, or much more interaction with me before actual filming. Which made it easier, or more demanding for us, and with this latter visit, just me. Since I’m trying to do the same things with my posts – tell stories with attractive pictures, I know how time consuming this process is. But at least I don’t have the same team  collaborative and commercial pressures on top, thank goodness.

The steely focus of the 2 formidable lady directors from different TV stations has been very similar – they’d pretty much worked out what story they wanted to tell, and their challenge was to mould our/my words to achieve this around the oodles of glorious footage which both crews will have obtained.

And to manage this both quickly and without too much fuss whilst politely ignoring my many annoying attempts, conscious, or not so, to shift them from their preferred storyline. (Shucks, no place for Rev. George Engleheart’s much acclaimed all white daffodil Beersheba, below, named after a pivotal battle on the Gaza-Beersheba line in 1917).

The latter crew had their researcher (in yellow top) making detailed timed notes throughout the day of every scene which was filmed, and a brief note of the subject matter, so that it could be more easily found during the laborious editing process. Wow… that’s a great concept should resources allow.

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Now for some aspects of the daffodil story which I’ve enjoyed finding out about as I prepared for this session, and which almost certainly won’t be covered on TV.

Firstly, that daffodils are capable of a sophisticated and fairly unusual form of what can best be described as contraception. This is all part of the (widespread) challenge for hermaphrodite flowers, which carry both male and female elements within the same structure – there are a few plant kingdom exceptions to this with distinct different gender plants, or single sex flowers – but not daffodils. The BIG challenge for immobile plants is how to minimise the risk, and problems associated with self-fertilisation. In other words how to ensure cross and not self-pollination.

There are many ways that flowers strive to manage this: physical differences –  relying on where stamens and stigma are placed relative to each other. As well as temporal devices- typically the anthers mature and release pollen grains, before the same flower’s female stigma becomes receptive to pollen landing on it and being able to grow. And then there are physiological measures – many plants can identify from genes/biochemistry when a pollen grain from the the anthers of the same plant land on its stigma and they’ll destroy it quickly. Either before it begins to grow its pollen tube which heads through the style and down towards the ovules in the ovary. Or indeed destroy the pollen tube halfway along its journey down the style. What the daffodil very cleverly does is different. It detects any same plant/flower pollen tubes as they’re growing down the style, and then destroys its ovules before the pollen tube reaches them. So it’s therefore a pre-zygotic, or pre-fertilisation action, and thus more like contraception than abortion.

At this point, I’m including this demo-track of a very young Elton John, and a song I’d never heard before, “Flowers will never die” with very simple lyrics by long-time collaborator Bernie Taupin.

And follow it with this interview link with a Professor of Botany, Spencer Barrett who not only discovered the daffodil flower physiology I’ve just described, but also was at school with Reg Dwight as he then was, and even played junior Wimbledon with him as his doubles partner. The discussion is well worth listening to for clearer insights into the sophisticated strategies plants go to, to avoid self-crossing.

https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/scienceshow/the-quirky-world-of-plant-reproduction/2991640

One of the first scientists to realise the importance of this, and indeed who spent years studying plants with his own experiments on self vs. cross pollination and the subsequent vigour/weakness/sterility of the different offspring was Charles Darwin, who is much more widely remembered for his work with animal evolution and survival of the fittest. Sadly Darwin, who married his own first cousin, and went on to father 10 children, was racked with guilt late in his own life, since 3 of his children from this marriage of close relatives died in infancy and another 3 later married and discovered they were infertile.

But the message from the humble daffodil is that it’s perhaps better to avoid wasting energy on producing the seed of poor quality self-fertilised offspring, even if by aborting all your potential seeds, that means that you’ll produce no seed at all during that year.

Another thing I’ve mused about is the common problem with daffodils going ‘blind’. They seem to do this more easily overtime than snowdrops, which are fellow members of the Amarylis family of geophyte bulbous flowering plants. I was asked to demonstrate, on camera, lifting and splitting a clump of  blind, local origin, Tenby daffodils, Narcissus obvallaris, which have a great tendency to do this. The bulbs multiply very readily, grow a little closer to the surface over time, become more congested, and gradually become so small that flower buds are no longer produced.

(Somewhat amusingly, I was asked to carry my brilliant Spear & Jackson ‘tubular steel drainage shovel along the path to reach the bulbs – which is excellent for this job. But the scene had to be shot again with me carrying the spade in an odd way, ‘cos the brand of the spade had been visible – OH MY… the hidden threat of the lawyers lurks everywhere these days!)

But this annoying habit of many geophytes reflects the other side to their dual survival strategy – to clonally split into identical bulbs, as well as setting seed. Belt and braces.

However, unlike snowdrops which quickly work their way to the surface and hence can be easily shifted around physically by moles and voles, or indeed gardeners, this rarely seems to happen with daffodils, at least here in the short term. So are daffodils another one of Michael Pollan’s “Botany of desire” species? Perhaps their global success and distribution in recent centuries, far from their mainly relatively restricted Mediterranean/European indigenous range, is dependent upon interaction with a single species – namely human beings. Who not only have massively tweaked them through artificial hybridization, but also on occasion will take a spade to them and lever the clump out of the ground. Splitting the bulbs and offering a few as souvenirs of their trip to Gelli to a couple of crew members, in this case.

Job done for these congested Tenbys. Hoping for a change of scene, they’re now on their way to the Mendips and Devon!

The final thought I’ve had from far too much narcissus narcotics, is reflecting on the similarities and differences between these two genera – Galanthus and Narcissus, and their history of culture, popularity and hybridisation at the hands of human beings.

In both cases just when they arrived in Britain is a little murky. Native N. pseudonarcissus has certainly been here a long time, and is a great natural survivor and a true naturaliser, growing from its own seed. It’s also certainly the most popular daffodil we grow with honey, solitary and bumble bees. It also sets quite a lot of fertile seed each year, which will happily germinate in the way that our other meadow flowers do – by simply falling to the ground.

The Tenby daffodil, which was really restricted for a long time to the small areas around Tenby in South West Wales does set seed, but in nothing like the same quantity. It also doesn’t seem to be found as a native anywhere else in the world. So how and when did it get to Tenby? Click here for some recently collated speculation on this subject.

But the oldest daffodil we grow, above, which was the only garden flower of any kind on the property when we acquired it in its derelict state in 1993, is the (probably hybrid) double daffodil variously known as Telamonius plenus, or otherwise also known as Van (it should have been Vincent, but for a transcription error) Sion. Vincent Sion was a ‘Fleming’ living in London, and we know that he was growing it in his garden in 1620. This is because it’s recorded in John Parkinson’s first major book, Paradisi in Sole Paradisus Terrestris, published in 1629, the same year that Catholic King Charles 1 dissolved parliament. Click here to see how highly regarded this book still is, judging by what an old copy would cost you. Parkinson’s weighty tome (he’d branched out from being an apothecary to the previous monarch, to become the very first Royal Botanist) features around 100 different narcissi, or daffodils. Out of a total of nearly 1,000 garden worthy plants he included in the book.

Yet after Charles’ execution, shortly followed by Parkinson’s death, this range of daffodils seemed to largely disappear both from written references and horticultural usage. Popping up again when in the late 1700’s Swedish Carl Linnaeus gave our native ‘Lenten Lily’, which would later inspire William Wordsworth, the name of Narcissus pseudonarcissus. As with snowdrops, which I’ve discussed here, there are possible hints that the daffodil’s associations with Catholic monarchs and traditions made it a dangerous plant to have anything to do with.

It was later still, in mid-Victorian times that a few pioneering breeder/hybridisers (Leeds, Barr, Backhouse, Engelheart, Brodie) saw the potential for greater diversity in these flowers. AND BIG MONEY. This meant thousands of new hybrids were bred, named and rushed out to a global population of gardeners excited by the latest new craze.

In marked contrast, early galnthophiles, around the same period, were discovering just a few new species and a few, mainly natural, hybrids. It’s much more recently in the last 30 years, that snowdrops have taken centre stage in the craze for the latest new snowdrop, and big money is once again changing hands amongst those for whom having the latest novelty is an important goal. And some have purposefully created their own hybrids – as was done decades earlier with daffodils. Hence there are now vastly more references to galanthophiles, than narcissophiles. Yet fundamentally, there’s a much wider range of daffodil flower styles, colours, heights and scents than you’ll ever find in a snowdrop.

Having dabbled in both genera in recent times, I’d say there is great merit in both, mainly since they largely segue in flowering times from December to May. They can fill a garden, even in our challenging conditions with beauty, scent and movement, before the deciduous perennials get into their stride. The fact that both are still so widely appreciated as garden plants – not just in the UK, but globally, hints at their value.

And that’s without even touching on their trials and use in pharmacology, perfume production, toxicity and their use in genetic modification of human food crops

So let’s salute both Narcissus and Galanthus and the historic obsessives who first pursued their hybridisation with such determination and as a result spread a love of daffodils around the globe.

And maybe even get excited by one’s own unique, unplanned additions. Three that I’ve found and really like this year, as unique to Gelli seedlings.

Finally, in the course of working this post up over several days, I came across a new Elton John collaborative album. I’ve just ordered a CD.

It’ll help fix this moment in time, with some music. There’s a very moving short YouTube featuring how it came to be made, which you can watch below. I love the fact that even though he’s in his late 70’s, with major visual impairment Elton wants to keep himself challenged and create new work. Which he undoubtedly has with this collaborative effort with Brandi Carlile. She’s an American artist who became obsessed with Elton as a young kid from a trailer home, and ended up becoming one of his many friends, before recently spending 20 days in a studio and jointly writing and recording these new songs.

A great inspiration for all of us who are a bit long in the tooth, to keep pushing on and striving for new goals.

Should, instead, you just want to listen to the typically Elton title track, here it is – though you’ll miss the point of some of the imagery, if you haven’t first watched the above.  “Who believes in Angels”