With perfect timing, for once, our week away on the Pembrokeshire coast coincided with the final week of unbroken, dry sunny weather of this record-breaking spring. The Met Office has now confirmed that not only has it been the warmest and sunniest in Wales and the UK, EVER, but only 3 summers have ever been sunnier seasons than this spring in the UK since 1910 – a remarkable statistic indeed. A little rain in mid-April meant that it was only the sixth driest spring on record in Wales. (It’s well worth studying their detailed data, maps and comments about such an exceptional period of weather.)

This short holiday was just what we needed: days to walk a little, but mainly sit down and do nothing. Something that over many years I’ve found very difficult to do.

And in the cocoon of the small valley leading down to the beach at Aberbach, Felin Hescwm lived up to the design of the fabulous hanging metal sign adorning the front of the old grain store. It was a perfect refuge. There’s really no need to pack any books, since the cottage has shelves full of huge numbers one could read, or take home for a pound for charity. However, I had packed two books I knew I wanted to read whilst properly switched off from distractions.

The first was the Wales Book of the Year, 2024, ‘Sarn Helen’, written by Tom Bullough with illustrations by the wonderful Pembrokeshire artist Jackie Morris.

Just a week before our holiday, we’d been to the inaugural, small literary festival, “Reading the Wild / Darllen y Gwyllt” held in nearby Llandovery to hear Bullough and Morris talk about the book, and how it came to be. In itself a wonderful thought-provoking discussion about the motivations for completing this project, and more generally, how they both go about their creative writing. And in Morris’ case drawing and painting.

(Many thanks and huge credit to Mandy Thomas of  Dragon’s Garden bookshop, Llandovery – who you can hear being interviewed about 22 minutes into this programme – for organising the festival. We’re delighted to hear that thanks in part to the wonderful complimentary feedback she’s received, she’s planning to repeat the festival next year on May 9th and 10th – make a note of the dates now!)

For anyone not living close to Sarn Helen, or who has never heard about what it is, a very brief explanation is necessary to set the scene. In addition, the YouTube below, of Bullough talking about his motivation for writing the book gives you a feel for the author’s deep passion for his subject. He is as engaging and challenging in print as he manages to be in this short talk.

Are you up to the challenges of getting hold of a copy and reading it though? It is not, in my opinion, as one brief quote on the paperback cover by Sir Simon Jenkins simply states: “A Delight”.

Sarn Helen is a Roman road constructed in the upland mid-West mountainous spine of Wales, running from the South coast at Neath, to the North coast at Conway. It was built as an extractive route, to allow the Romans to exploit and remove the gold they found and mined with considerable skill at the (very near to us), mines at Dolaucothi in Pumsaint. 

Their only significant exploited source of gold in Britain.

Bullough’s book is part travelogue of how he walked the route in a few sections beginning after the first lockdown ended in 2020. There are wonderful descriptions of landscape and well observed nuggets of meetings and conversations along the way. But it’s so much more than that. He interweaves stories of the history of Wales, what it is to be Welsh and the importance, positive and negative, of the Welsh language to this land. He has a deep interest and knowledge of the many Celtic Saints who came to live in these remote areas after the Romans had left. But even more than that it’s a story of where Wales, and the world more generally is now, as our societies have become increasingly divorced from the natural world and our impact on it. And apparently unwilling to adapt or modify individual behaviours and lifestyles fast enough to avert ecological collapses on a grand scale as the effects of climate change play out. It was Bullough who approached Morris and asked her if she could illustrate the book with simple ink drawings of some of the species in Wales now ranked as being in peril of extinction.

This is why, with a soft yet determined zeal there is an evangelical element to his writing. Why he joined extinction rebellion, was arrested in Parliament Square, and why he wrote a moving statement which he read to the sentencing magistrates, and which is included in a chapter of its own. Why his observations are intercut with quoted interviews with several locally based academics working in various fields associated with topics pertaining to current environmental changes. And why many of these sections make for worrying, if not depressing, reading. Yet he finds models for hope in Wales’ ancient history as to how we might adapt to live as societies before calamity strikes.

(My only minor issue, for which I will happily forgive him, was the (then) accepted wisdom which he discusses with one of his academic interviewees, of the widely promoted origin of the Covid 19 virus: as a natural spillover from the wild, as a consequence of human pressure on wild ecosystems. Would that it had been that simple!!)

I’ll close with a few other quotes which might tempt you to buy this powerful book, and read it:

“Sarn Helen is a beautifully downbeat travelogue that’s full of love, rage and humour. A brilliant, pivotal book by one of the most engaged and engaging writers around, it will change you”
Toby Litt

“Sarn Helen is accomplished and stunning in every one of its many personalities: as history, as memoir, as eco-parable, as impassioned call to arms”
Niall Griffiths

“Part love-letter, part lament, part call-to-action, Sarn Helen is one man’s passionate attempt – in prose that’s at once lyrical and forensic – to put into words what’s at stake for us all in our present moment”
Carys Davies

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It was indeed the perfect place to read this book in this secluded cwm where there was almost never any man made sound (save the occasional kicking in of the oil-fuelled boiler). The birds had the landscape to themselves, much as they would have done over the last centuries, or millennia. With plenty of cover in the ffridd-like vegetation, where much of the gorse and other ‘evergreens’ showing shocking amounts of dead, windward foliage – a legacy from Storm Darragh’s blast in December.Sitting here, reading, I once looked up, timed to perfection to see a dolphin leap out of the ocean, right in front of me. Vertically, not broaching the sea in an arcing curve. But mainly in pauses from reading, caught the myriad colours of the ocean and sky as the days drifted past. I’ve never seen a dolphin leap like that before. And on our walks, we saw plenty of courting Speckled Wood butterflies, a single peregrine, a fast disappearing adder.

And even on a scramble through Cwm Soden/Siliau, one of the few pockets of ancient Celtic temperate rain forest left along the Western fringes of Wales, a pair of fleeing Pearl, or Small Pearl Bordered Fritillaries.

But where were all the sea birds? No cormorants this time, a couple of gulls, a pair of Canada Geese and a pair of Oyster Catchers.

I spent an evening at low tide scouring the 60 metres of fine grey gravel/sand at the wave’s edge, looking for signs of marine fauna. The sort of things we’ve have seen easily as children, whizzing away from our paddling feet – shrimps, sand eels, small crabs, dabs. Nothing moved. So I tried the many rock pools. Limpets and sea anemones, yes, but no crabs, no hermit crabs, no shrimp. Nothing moved until after nearly 20 minutes I spotted a single small fish – probably a goby, dart away into some seaweed. All I found and retrieved of note a day later was a washed up plastic balloon.

How far had that travelled to get here? Just up, or down the coast, or blown in from Ireland?  And who is this Lacey-Mae? An unfamiliar name to me. Perhaps that’s why no images were conjured in my mind – I’m anyway too out of touch with current teenage appearances. And what will this beach look like, when she reaches my age? And will she even still be able to visit it in person?

No wonder the sea birds have gone. Later, friends told us that there’s been a marine heat wave off the coasts of Britain this year, with surface sea temperatures 4 degrees C higher than usual. There’s an excellent review of sea temperature and its impact on this website, by the Plymouth Marine Laboratory, and data on the current Celtic marine temperatures here. Add in last year’s relentless sewage discharges into many Welsh rivers, and it’s not difficult to see why marine life might have been impacted significantly. But what do scientific studies of marine life off the West Wales coast tell us?

And here’s the thing. Strangely, the coastline of Cardigan Bay has always been relatively poor in diversity of marine fauna, compared with other Welsh coastlines for reasons discussed in this abstract of a survey paper published in 1949, by Ronald Evans  (The Intertidal Ecology of Rocky Shores in South Pembrokeshire).

There seems to be only very limited ongoing monitoring of this fauna, as far as I can ascertain.

I’ll end this section of this post with our most exciting sighting, again a first for us both, as we climbed up the coast path on Dinas Island (in the distance, above). My eyes must have logged the novelty, subconsciously, before we got so close that our shadows disturbed it, and made it fly away over the emerging bracken. A vibrant green, small butterfly resting and nectaring on an ageing, slightly trodden down bluebell flower, right on the edge of the path. I was certain I knew what it was, since the UK only has one green butterfly, the Green Hairstreak, Callophrys rubi . Thanks to Fiona for all these images of our coastal walks, with her smartphone – I consciously left my camera behind on walks, as another element of having a break from too many captured images.

Apparently, like the iridescent blue of kingfisher feathers, the butterfly’s lower wings aren’t really green. They’re brown like its upper wing surfaces, which one would rarely see, since they always rest, like this one, with their wings held vertically. The green is a trick of light reflection/diffraction. The wing scales contain microscopic, repeating complex structures made out of chitin that act as a diffraction grating. When light interacts with these structures, it’s bent and refracted in a way that enhances the green wavelengths of light and cancels other colours creating the marvellous green iridescence that our eyes and cameras perceive.

Click here for a paper (Coexistence of both gyroid chiralities in individual butterfly wing scales of Callophrys rubi !) discussing in considerable technical and even mathematical detail what these structures look like, including a wonderful 3 D video download of just how multi-layered the wing scales are – find this at the end of the paper in supplementary information.

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We returned home refreshed but apprehensive about how the garden and landscape would look, after another 7 days with lots of sunshine and no rain. Everything had survived, saved by temperatures in the main below 20 degrees C, and the ecology of our ever maturing, densely planted garden. The fields looked less impressive, with minimal grass growth, and emerging orchids looking a fraction of the height they were last year. After a quick whizz round with the watering hose and a quick mow of some areas of grass (with garden visitors due the next day, and a little rain due overnight), my focus turned to collecting daffodil seed.

I’d noticed that beside the vegetable beds, the Narcissus pseudonarcissus seed pods were already splitting. This original cohort of bulbs were planted up along an East facing, part shaded bank and had flowered quite poorly this year. They certainly haven’t spread very well, but this is mainly because every time they’ve flowered and set seed, I’ve collected the seedpods. Saved the seeds, and scattered them in the upper hay meadow in front of the shepherd’s hut. In the early years, I hand pollinated all such flowers with a brush and sometimes cross-pollinated with any other short, early daffodil that might have been in flower at the time. Including N. ‘Topolino’, a named cultivar that frankly looks very similar, though slightly chunkier than the variable forms of N. pseudonarcissus which we’d bought – 100 bulbs, many years ago.

After I’d climbed up the hill with a single yoghurt pot to collect pods, I soon realised that this was too small a container for such a bumper seed harvest. I already knew, having counted them in flower, that there were at least 350 flowers in this part of the meadow this spring. In this last week of May, they all seemed to have filled pods in various states of maturity – some were already splitting, spilling the shiny black seed to the ground. A single pod, I’d also discovered this year, contained up to 50 seeds, so it seemed possible I should have a total crop of around 17,000 seeds. After a bit more leisurely pod splitting, seed weighing and counting, I arrived at the following fairly accurate final tally.

5 grams of weighed seeds amounted to 870 seeds.

140 grams of these N. pseudonarcissus X seeds meant a harvest of around 24,000 seeds.

WOW. That’s some progress over the maybe 7 or 8 years since I first scattered seeds onto the turf. In the light of the recent BBC Gardener’s World piece, and the Don’s comments about sowing daffodils onto pasture seeming a novel idea to him, I wondered why. So did a quick search for Narcissus pseudonarcissus seed. And guess what? There currently seems to be no one offering this form of the native ‘Bastard’ daffodil, but in a very few parts of the UK, naturalised, British daffodil as seed in the UK. Which is strange, given that if you look at this review paper, you’ll see that N. pseudonarcissus spp. are thought to be one of the parents of 99% of modern yellow trumpet daffodil cultivars. There is one business selling seed of the Tenby daffodil, Narcissus obvallaris at £2.90 plus P&P for just 10 seeds, and that’s it. Which seems a real shame. So here I am, with all these seeds, and what to do?

My response has been to scatter three quarters of them immediately over the upper third of the meadow. This is a little earlier than I’ve done before, but the general foliage growth is so thin due to the lack of rain, that I can safely do so without damaging the eventual hay crop. The rest have been placed immediately in a small air tight container in the fridge. They’ll remain as both a back up resource, and potentially available in small quantities to anyone interested in the near future.

I may even sow some into pots if I can get round to it, though for me this is extra pfaff and work, and will inevitably create a bit more work (for anyone) in due course having to plant bulbs from the pots into their final resting places. The counter argument is that sowing in pots (possibly) will result in higher germination rates than merely scattering seed over turf, as I’ve done in the past to create the population that has now yielded this harvest.

And this is a critical point, isn’t it? The seeds which I’ve harvested have made it, or rather their parents have.

Germinated, grown a first root and shoot.

Survived possible slug predation early on in a tough environment with poor soil.

And then, years later have grown a bulb large enough to flower themselves and set seed – this year having been entirely pollinated by our bees and other insects. Not a finger wielded brush in sight.

These seed offspring are now potential new bulbs, of survivor phenotypes adapted to a Welsh climate and soil. Not only that, but if you look below at some of my photos of these daffodils this year, you’ll see a significant range of flower types, colours and sizes. Certainly not all potential award winners on a show bench. But by such known provenance, well suited to these sort of conditions and having potential for creating naturalising displays in grassy areas.

This is a population of true toughies, not mollycoddled in a nursery, or hand pollinated with a brush by someone pushing the aesthetic design spectrum of what can be achieved with a daffodil flower. And I would have thought as such these seeds represent an ideal starting point for anyone wishing to establish early daffodils in pasture, with less effort or costs than using bulbs. Toughies which have been put through the trials and tribulations of an 800 foot above sea level upland meadow with around 2 metres of rain annually.

So, SOW!

Should any readers or visitors to the garden fancy getting their hands on some of these seeds – in quantities of 150, since that should include a reasonable diversity of mother plants, then drop me an email (no phone calls please). For a donation of £6.99, by way of nominal support towards the cost of running this website and blog, and all the years of information it now contains, I’ll send you a free packet together with some germination instructions. UK addresses only, I’m afraid. Why 150 seeds? ‘Cos I’ve found a small measuring scoop, which contains roughly that number, which I can use to save me counting them out.😊

In the course of talking about daffodil seed, I should repeat that despite this record breaking spring of very suitable conditions for insect pollination of any flower, nearly 90 % of the daffodils we grow never set any seed. Not even under such perfect conditions. So like many of the lovely old hybrids we grow, they are either functionally sterile, or have no appeal to the diversity of insect pollinators which now abound here. (As an interesting aside, there were more honey bees and bumblebees exploring the small group of Nectaroscordum siculum flowers, below, when we returned, in one minute, than we saw in an entire week away in Pembrokeshire – coastal cliff path flowers, and all. This is a direct consequence of how the garden has been planted up over many years with insect friendly flowers.)

This lack of seed formation in most cultivated daffodil bulbs is why, for a long time, I’ve always said that the often quoted gardening advice to dead head daffodils is a waste of time and effort – there are simply no seeds in any apparent seedpods. If in doubt, press them to feel for seeds, or split one open gently with a finger nail, and look for the mature black seeds, or in later flowering varieties which might not have fully ripened, their pearly white precursors.

The rationale for such often quoted advice is that the plant will divert its energies into forming the seed (which as we’ve discussed probably aren’t there) and not into next year’s bulb. This bulb is then less likely to bulk up and have the resources to produce its own flower the following season. This may be the case for the few types of bulbs which do set seed. However my own thinking has always been that if one gets a crop of seed, and hence potentially some sort of new bulbs eventually from such seed that’s a good trade off. The experts will probably say that it’s unlikely you’ll ever get any top notch flowers – breeders spend years trialling and abandoning potential new cultivars before selecting a very few to sell commercially. My response to this is twofold. Firstly I’ve no interest in commercially sellable new variants – rather fecund and vigorous forms of flowers for our soil and climate. And secondly I was fascinated by just how many (eventually) highly regarded and propagated new Magnolia cultivars the late Sir Peter Smithers was able to produce from seed – despite being told by the experts that this was a waste of time!

Two additional things have happened after this perfect pollinating season to make me think some more about this whole process. Firstly, it’s usually the same few cultivars, or species which DO set seed. And the numbers of seed are typically very low – often less than 5 per pod. No cultivar to date has set seed in anything like the numbers of the N. pseuodonarcissus above, other than N. ‘Topolino’. And very few of the older hybrids seem to ever set any seeds.

A particular disappointment for me had been the lack of seed set in N. poeticus forms, the later flowering ‘Pheasant Eyes’ – I usually get a few seedpods, above, but even this is unusual, despite me having regular efforts in previous years at transferring pollen with a brush. But this year, after all my extra daffodil reading in advance of the TV filming, I discovered this insight, hidden away in one of Spencer Barrett’s published papers (Phylogenetic reconstruction of the evolution of stylar polymorphisms in Narcissus (Amaryllidaceae) Sean W. Graham, Spencer C. H. Barrett)

“Field observations of pollinators visiting flowers of Narcissus species over the past decade establish three primary functional groups. The first group, exemplified by members of sections Pseudonarcissi and Bulbocodii, possesses flowers with large funnel-like coronas and short, wide, or highly funnelform floral tubes. These flowers are pollinated by a wide range of small- and large-bodied bees that generally forage for pollen from anthers enclosed within the corona. The second involves species with long, narrow floral tubes, relatively shallow coronas, and horizontally orientated, highly fragrant flowers (e.g., sections Jonquillae, and Narcissus like the poeticus group, as shown below-sic). Members of these sections are primarily adapted for pollination by long-tongued Lepidoptera, mostly sphingid moths (e.g., Macroglossum spp. i.e. Hawkmoths), although flowers are also visited by long-tongued bees, butterflies, and flies. Nectar serves as the main floral reward in these species….”

This year, despite no artificial pollinating, the most fecund N. poeticus type that we grow – a vigorous pre-1870 French origin form called N. ‘Ornatus’ (available from Croft 16 daffodils until June 15th) has set many more pods than when I’ve hand pollinated them. Even better, another vigorous poeticus form, which sadly I’ve yet to narrow down and work out its name, has seed pods on nearly every tall flower stem.

Curious, I split a pod with my nail, and this is the seed set – fantastic. You can see just how long it is from the base of the very shallow flower to the top of the ovary. The nectar secreting tissue sits just above the ovary, so clearly no bee is going to be able to reach its tongue that far. But a hawkmoth? Definitely. At this point I searched through my on line moth diaries to see which hawkmoths I’d found in May in the garden, when I was looking for such things!

So a short list of species with tongues definitely long enough to reach down, and as is their way, move efficiently and quickly from one flower to another. With the bulbs helpfully planted close together by me, any moths could have easily worked over both of the patches of this variety, transferring pollen as they did so.

I sense another small challenged for future years. Can I get a photo of a moth doing this, since they’re always crepuscular or nocturnal?

I should add that there’s also been quite good seed set in a short species of Narcissus jonquilla var. henriquesii, which is multi-headed and has the same long floral tube as the poeticus types (Available from Scamp’s Quality daffodils, here). As a newly arrived form last autumn, these were planted amongst other much more glamorous cultivars like N. ‘Katherine Jenkins’, (a jonquilla hybrid) in a trial bed. Although not a single pod formed on any of her flowers. So who know what curious offspring might develop from these seeds, should they eventually germinate. But then I guess henriquesii (named in honour of Júlio Augusto Henriques (1838 – 1928) the Professor of Botany and Director of the Botanical Gardens at the University of Coimbra, Portugal) never anticipated being in this situation – i.e. sharing a bed with Katherine Jenkins.

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Even more exciting than this (what, really, is that possible?) was a thought that suddenly dawned on me and led to me to ruminating about a possible answer to a garden and meadow conundrum that has perplexed me for many years, and which I’ve been unable to find a satisfactory explanation for.

Why do a lot of perennial flowers, cultivated or wild, ever survive in one place for more than a few years. Typically they bulk up, flower well, set seed and then after 3 to 5 years gradually, or more usually very suddenly largely die out. Little or none of the seed which must have been dropped over these years ever seems to germinate to replace the lost plants. Sometimes, as in the case of Candelabra Primulas in our garden, plants will appear in a different part of the garden, but very rarely back in the areas where they thrived initially.

In wildflower hay meadows, the same seems to apply. Typically the yellow rattle is the first to dominate, and then waxes and wanes in numbers over the years :more recent area above, later area below. Of course this isn’t a perennial. It’s a monocarpic (single flowering) annual and once flowering and seed production is completed, the plant dies. Job done and eventual succession and survival of the species assured from the huge numbers of seed it has produced: which incidentally is typical of the numbers of seed produced by plants with this monocarpic strategy.

Other (perennial) plants which seem to threaten to dominate and then become far less prolific include Common Sorrel, above, and this year, Meadow Buttercups. Our lower wild flower hay meadow, which followed the same process of establishment as the upper one, just 3 years later, has followed exactly the same pattern, but with the extra years as a time lag. Sorrel establishes and is widespread by about year 3, then the following year has largely gone. The meadow buttercups are about 3 years behind the sorrel in peaking, and this year seem almost absent from the upper meadow, yet still prolific in the lower one, below.

Maybe this is all just inevitable, and linked to the plant’s natural lifespan. But what if it wasn’t that simple?

Not that many perennial garden plants (in our garden) seem to set lots of seed, and yet still persist for many years in the same place. Geranium macrorrhizum, above, and Ajuga reptans certainly do, although the latter is more of a natural spreader, so it’s less easy to assess if it really has stayed growing in the same location, or moved subtly over time in the same general area.

So too do Aquliegia vulgaris, and sea campion, Silene uniflora in front of the house, which must be into its second decade from first scattering seed onto the cobbles, and it’s still doing very well.

I’d always assumed that such a loss of plants from a particular area, despite massive seed drop must either be as a result of some pest, parasite or pathogen building up in numbers. Or as a result of the plant exhausting micro-nutrients it required. Or maybe a combination of both. It can’t be simply plant old age and death, surely or why don’t the dropped seed germinate and replace them immediately? I speculated that hidden fungi or micro-organisms might be involved in some mysterious, but clearly widespread phenomenon.

But what if instead, the plants all just died at the same time, in a mysteriously co-ordinated, or programmed mass death, and in some way passed on a germination pause capability in its seed, falling into this same area? What if, indeed, many of the plants effectively committed suicide at the same time. Leaving their seeds behind in the seed bank, to rise again at some variable point in the future. Which brings me onto 3 new words:

Mitoptosis: A poorly analyzed phenomenon that can be defined as a sort of mitochondrial death programme. Mitochondria are the energy factories of most individual cells. It was first hypothesized to take place in cells which were undergoing apoptosis

Apoptosis: Programmed cell death :A type of cell death in which a series of molecular steps in a cell lead to its death. This is one method a multicellular, multi-organ creature uses to get rid of unneeded or abnormal cells.

And finally Phenoptosis: First discussed by Vladimir Skulachev in this 2002 paper:

In all these cases, the “Samurai law of biology”–it is better to die than to be wrong–seems to be operative. The operation of this law helps complicated living systems avoid the risk of ruin when a system of lower hierarchic position makes a significant mistake. Thus, mitoptosis purifies a cell from damaged and hence unwanted mitochondria; apoptosis purifies a tissue from unwanted cells; and phenoptosis purifies a community from unwanted individuals.

Might Skulachev’s hypothesis be at work with flowering plants too?

A more recent review paper from 2021 discusses in much more detail how plants may well utilise such strategies. “Senescence: “The Compromised Time of Death That Plants May Call on Themselves” by Matin Miryeganeh.

Many of these processes are controlled through the switching on and off of multitude genes within the plant cells. The interaction of such gene regulation with the natural environmental variations that any plant is exposed to, make it a very difficult concept to explore scientifically with accuracy. One senses this area of science is only in its infancy. But on reflection, it’s already evident in the variety of strategies that flowering plants have – annual, biennial, perennial, repeat flowering or monocarpic. The fascinating insight from Matin Miryeganeh.’s review  is that every stage of any plant’s development process (germination, vegetative growth, flowering, seed formation and ageing/death) seems to be capable of modification, BY THE PLANT, and not just passively in response to the environment.

“Plants have evolved the ability to sense seasonal cues and alter their developmental responses accordingly. This process is called seasonal developmental plasticity. Because of their sessile nature, plasticity is probably the most efficient way for plants to change their environment. Even though they cannot move and change their habitat, they do change their exposure to it through phenotypic response to environmental cues. They carefully time their life history events to overlap and synchronize with favorable environmental conditions in order to increase reproductive success and maximize fitness. Thus, plants need to make important developmental decisions, such as when to germinate, when to shift from vegetative to reproductive phase, when to fruit, and finally when to senesce. They enter the reproductive phase by flowering, and schedule to exit the reproductive phase at the proper time as well (floral termination or senescence). This means environmental changes will influence the expression of their developmental traits which in turn may cause strong natural selection on those traits and evolutionary responses that depend on genetic and/or epigenetic variation that may even be inherited by next generation.”

Experiments using different aged plants have suggested that in interest of their final outcome and fitness, plants carefully weigh out environmental cues and transit to their next developmental phase at the proper time, even if that means transiting to terminal senescence phase earlier and thus shortening their lifespan. How much plants have control over senescence timing and how they balance internal and external signals for that is not well understood. (Bold-sic) Future studies are needed to identify processes that trigger senescence timing in response to environment and investigate genetic/epigenetic mechanisms behind it.

As I read the whole of this paper, I was left with two thoughts – firstly we’re only just beginning to understand what plants are capable of. But secondly it seems entirely plausible that at a population level (as in a meadow type community), once plants have flowered and set seed en-masse, they may opt to (early) age/self destruct. After all, we know that this is what happens with all monocarpic plants anyway. And in the case of many long lived bamboo species, this can happen synchronously in different locations around the world. Thus denying pathogens/parasites or predators a chance to exploit them to extinction. They have the luxury – unlike mammals and many animals – of having an embryonic juvenile ‘resting’ stage (seed) which can potentially leap into action in the months, years or decades ahead to germinate and re-populate a community.

Once we’ve gone, as far as I know, we’ve (at least mortally) gone. For sure eggs, sperm and embryos can all be frozen with high tech electrically powered equipment. But that’s hardly the same degree of resilience, I’d suggest, as most flowering plants achieve as part of their evolved ecology. As for phenoptosis, it doesn’t (yet) seem to be widely advocated as part of a long term survival strategy for Homo sapiens. Although there are early signs of its promotion.

How does this link back to daffodil seed? Well, if your daffodils rely entirely on clonal bulb multiplication, then they’re in danger of dying out, sooner or later. From anything from rot of the bulbs from excessive wet, to bulb eel worm, to the dreaded bee-look-alike Narcissus fly, Merodon equestris, which I’ve finally become attuned to. (The last of the 3 images below). Hearing their very loud buzz, a bit like an angry honey bee, but slightly higher in pitch. And spotting their restless low-level zig-zag flight between plants when the temperatures rise above about 20 degrees C on sunny days.

Rarely pausing to re-fuel from a few flowers like Erodium manescaveii for more than a couple of seconds, and being devilishly hard to catch in a butterfly net. Better to jet them to the ground with a hose and squash them before they swiftly recover from their dousing. Or after many minutes spent hunting them down over a couple of sessions, and managing to kill just a few, accepting that they’re all part of the garden scene, and rarely likely to take out a whole, diverse population of bulbs. Like any other animal, they’ll have their scent/taste preferences. Should your daffodils produce lots of seed however, even if the individual seed generating bulbs survive for a shorter time than if you’d removed their seed pods, they have their own reliable fail safe replacement banker.

But it adds an extra dimension to the dilemma for any gardener who opts to encourage pollinating insects into the garden, particularly with regard to any ornamental flowers. The more insects, the faster the flowers will be pollinated, and the shorter the individual flowers and floral display will last. Now, perhaps there’s an added dilemma: that should plants be pollinated well, and set lots of seed, perhaps that very success will encourage the plants to senesce and die out sooner than if they hadn’t been so well pollinated.

Which probably all favours the more relaxed approach to garden making, design and maintenance that we’ve gradually adopted – forget about total human domination and specific plants in specific places. See yourself as a steward. Select a plant palette you know and understand. Probably different palettes to suit different areas, where levels of shade and micro-climates favour different plants. Avoid thugs, remove any native weeds which you’re not happy to allow swiftly, but otherwise go with the natural flow. It does seem easier, can still look lovely, and tends towards a self-sustaining ecosystem in the longer term. Which we, friends and visitors might even view as a haven.

Decisions, decisions. Again. Since this is often where my blog posts seem to lead me. And which also gets me back to where I began, and the powerful message embedded in Tom Bullough’s book.

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To leave you on a lighter note, I spent the time extracting all the daffodil seeds from their pods listening to a recently bought CD of piano music by Australian/British pianist Piers Lane. It lasted the perfect 75 minutes to allow me to complete the task and consists of 18 (mainly short) pieces from the last century. All of which, over a long career, he’s played as concert encores.

The album, ‘Piers Lane Goes to Town’ comes with enlightening notes about each piece, written by Lane himself. Very necessary since over half of the composers, I’d never heard of, with many of them being  fellow Australians. It’s a beautifully played and recorded album, and the penultimate piece is his version of a parody of a Beethoven piano sonata. Composed by a very young Dudley Moore, and based on the recognisable, familiar tune of the theme from the film ‘Bridge over the River Kwai’.

Here’s Lane’s recording:

And here for comparison is a very grainy early performance by Dudley Moore himself, as part of a ‘Beyond the Fringe’ live set, from the 1950’s. Anyone else see hints of the much later Mr. Bean in his body language and appearance? Although I didn’t know that Rowan Atkinson can play the piano.

But maybe I was wrong?