HERALDS OF SPRING.

Hutt News, Volume 9, Issue 15, 18 September 1935, Page 7

HERALDS OF SPRING.

(By 11. i'oole, I'.H.H.y.) "Queen Dall'odowndiily has come into town la yellow petlicoals and a green "own" Kadi year, as a sijvn manual of the promise of spring. "Trumpets of Gold" herald the advent of His Majesty —the Daffodil—for with each new season a new cloth of gohl is woven by Mother Nature, an emblem of all that is fresh and pure, undi beautiful —the Daffodil. Dadodils must always have been genera I favourites with folk. Right back in the midst of antiquity, many hundreds lif years before the birth of Christianity, and right down ■through tht> ages to the present day. there is plenty of evidence of the interest aroiiM'd by this important spring flower. As a recurring emblem of life, rather than death, do most people regard the Daffodil or Narcissus, yet according to (Ireek mythology, it is to death Narcissus owes its name. Ovid tells us ni a legend that Narcissus was a Greecian Appollo famous for his beauty, and was the sou of a liver god named Cephissus and a nymph named Leiiope. a prophet and seer named Faresias told the mother of Narcissus tiTai, the son would assuredly have a long life provided he never looked upon his own features. Narcissus, being only frail nud very human, failed, and drew upon himself the vengeance of the gods by I'n Ire ling in love with his reflections in itlio clcar water of a spring. He then rejected the love of a nymph named"Kcho," and so the legend runs,

cither pined away or destroyed himself. The flower that bears his name sprang up irinn the spot where he died, and was n« l! ' ] fd Narcissus. Morton in his recent hook on Palestine, says: The double Daffodil found in Palestine is the scriptural rose of Sharon and the scarlet anemones growing en the hills of Nazareth, are the lilies of the field." Visitors to the show on September 18 and l!>. will see the cream of the modern daffodils, the aristocratic de-

scendants of the old-time flower which has been an inspiration to poets down the ages, and one may find it immortalized in prose and verse. Wordsworth, in his "The Bliss of Solitiple" thus describes a crowd he eould not avoid: "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 Besides the lake", beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze."