I love almost everything about these first weeks of spring - days lengthening, birds singing, buds bursting, and those darling & dreaded daffodils that pop up gloriously for a brief bloom period ... just to tease me about how much reidentifying and relabeling work I have to do.
According to collection management system (aka, the plant records database), we have over 352 unique daffodil taxa in our collection. In a perfect world, each of those plantings has a display label, accession number, photo documentation, and an associated geographical location.
However, the world of public garden is far from perfect. The truth is, very few of our daffodils have had the plant records attention they deserve. They hadn't been mapped, inventoried, verified, relabeled, or photographed. I can understand why - it's a lot of work. It's especially a lot of work to get done in the short amount of time before they finish blooming (and the key characteristics revealed in their flowers is lost for another entire year).
