Although daffodils (Narcissus) aren’t native to California, they’re certainly well adapted here, most needing no supplemental watering in a normal year. Sometimes well adapted means invasive, but luckily these plants play well with the environment.
These are just simple daffodils we’ve planted over the years. The miniature daffodils were in a gift pot; the others went in the ground in fall as bulbs, the “normal” way of putting these plants in the ground.
We plant the bulbs among ornamental grasses, giving the bulbs maximum time to develop in spring and store energy (and increase flower production) for the coming year. The grasses get cut back just before the daffodils emerge, then grow up to hide the bulbs’ leaves as they age and brown in late spring.
Here in Sacramento, narcissus are often the first bulbs to bloom – but they’re typically paperwhite narcissus (Narcissus papyraceus) with small, delicate looking white flowers. They don’t count. Daffodils are bigger, bolder and more colorful, putting on a show that gets noticed.
Ravenous snails or slugs tend to transform the flowers in our garden into lace – ecologically friendly snail bait just doesn’t adequately protect the flowers, so we rush out to admire them as they open, knowing their time of beauty will be short, especially in wetter years.