How to: deal with Daffodil foliage in late spring

OK I'm getting in on this one a bit early, but better too early than too late!

Daffodil foliage... we all love the Daffodils, they are the sign of spring, we love their cheerful colour, and for many people, it's one of the few bits of poetry that they can actually quote. 

The poem is usually known as "Daffodils" but it's actually called "I wandered lonely as a Cloud", by the poet Wordsworth, and it starts:

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

 

There are actually three more verses, but no-one ever bothers to learn them. Bit of a shame really, because the last verse is lovely: 

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.  

"The bliss of solitude". I love that. Me, weeding around the daffodils, with the little birdies chirping away like mad things: that's my idea of blissful solitude.

Anyway, back to the plot: we all love the daffs, but there comes a point, in a few weeks' time, when the flowers are gone, but we are lumbered with the foliage.

What a mess.

Most people know that "one" should not cut down the foliage, because the plant needs those leaves to photosynthesise, and to store up the sugars in the bulb, to fuel the following year's flowers. 

This means that, when planting bulbs, thought needs to be given to how you are going to manage the foliage, after flowering time. 

If you plant them in your lawn, for example, you have to accept that you are not going to be able to cut that lawn until at least the end of May, sometimes right into the middle of June.

Obviously the best place for daffodils, then, is somewhere that doesn't need to be mowed: under deciduous trees is always good, but we don't all have a small woodland copse.... if you can leave areas of your lawn to grow long for a while, that's perfect: but it's not always easy to do. Most people end up with the daffodils growing in clumps in the lawn, and you just have to put up with having blocks of long grass,  until mid summer.

But if they are not in your lawn, but are in your beds, as in the photo above, well, what then? We don't really want all that foliage flopping about, but we can't just cut it back...

In my youth, it was the fashion to tie the leaves in a loose knot: but in recent years that has been frowned upon, on the grounds that it damages the leaves and prevents them sending back their photosynthesised goodness to the bulb.

But we don't really want all that foliage flopping about....

In a perfect world, we would just put up with it, but I live in the real world, and my Clients always ask me to tidy up the daffodil leaves far, far earlier than is advisable.

So I devised a way to deal with them: plaits. Fat, loose, plaits. Like this:

It's not as tight and restrictive as it looks: first I gently bend over the main mass of the floppy foliage in one direction or another, then I take a couple of leaves from the outside and fold them over the "sausage" of leaves. 

Then a couple of leaves from the other side. 

And so on, until the effect is that of a plait, but actually it's only the outside few leaves which are laying over each other, all the rest are lying lengthwise. 

This gets the foliage out of the way of the herbaceous plants which are trying to get through: it assuages the Client's need for tidyness: and it still allows a degree of photosynthesising, so it is not doing the plants any harm.

I can say this with certainty, because in this particular garden, I have been loosely plaiting the daffodil leaves since 2015, and the show of flowers just gets better every year.

In due course, the leaves start to die off naturally, and once they start to go brown, I know that it is time to start removing them:

At this point, I gently pull the leaves, and any that come out without a fight go straight onto the compost. 

Any which are not ready to come out are left, until such time as they are. Ready to come out, that is.

I never yank them out, or pull them out forcibly:  be patient, wait until the bulb has finished with them, at which point they will come loose of their own accord.

So  my "plaits" get thinner and thinner until one week, I realise that they are finally all gone, hooray!

It always strikes me as odd that people think of Daffodils as a five-minute wonder:

...but they start poking their noses up in late October, as you can see in this photo - right - which was taken on the 25th October last year.

And we are not finished with them until at least late May, sometimes well into June.

So that's a long time, for a five-minute wonder!

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