What a bright and beautiful sight on an unseasonably warm January day…brilliant yellow buttercups! Or are they?
Just as soon as you say, “Oh look! The buttercups have started blooming,” someone will correct you by saying, “Those aren’t buttercups; they are daffodils.” And then, someone overhears you and says, “No, they are jonquils!”
Then just to confuse things, another person hollers, “My granny used to call them narcissus, and my granny was never wrong!” Well, Granny was right — sort of!
The gorgeous yellow flowers we see in early spring, or sometimes even in mid to late winter, beside the road or in someone’s yard, are indeed daffodils.
A native of northern Europe, the daffodil is one of the first flowers to bloom in late winter. It will start poking its head out of the ground on the first day of sunshine after New Year’s Day and will even bloom despite frost and snow.
A jonquil is a type of daffodil, and so is the narcissus. The narcissus tends to be smaller and have clusters of small flowers on each stem.
The buttercup is actually a wild European flower that is considered a weed by some. It does have a yellow flower, and that is probably why the name has been misused so often.
If you take a drive out in the country, you can often identify the site of an old house by seeing a double row of daffodils out in a field. They may be all by themselves, with the house long gone. They appear on creek banks, having washed downstream from someone’s garden or yard. Or once planted by a grave, they have spread to the adjoining wooded acres, because they bloom before the trees have leafed out and they can soak in the springtime sunshine!
Whatever you call these pretty yellow flowers, they are like a ray of sunshine on a dreary January day. Thank you to Ms. Lisa Nutt for the photo of the flowers already blooming in her yard in Waynesboro.
