A Daffodil Tour

What a great town East Hampton is for gardeners.

How many places in America are home to a facility like the LongHouse Foundation, at once private and public, intimate of scale and expansive in area, and important enough to make a nationally recognized expert hop off a plane from Holland at midnight on a Friday and come out here to give a slide talk and memorable garden tour at 3 p.m. the next day?

Brent Heath of the Daffodil Mart in Virginia, who is to bulbs what Bill Gates is to computers, has been advising Jack Lenor Larsen, LongHouse's chatelain, about his daffodil plantings for a long time. Mr. Larsen claims to have over 250,000 in flower this year (not all at once, of course), which is stretching it, but maybe not so very much.

The Biggest Hoax

With about 50 people assembled Saturday in what Mr. Larsen calls his "media room," Mr. Heath, a genial man of about 45 who was wearing a miniature pewter daffodil in his lapel, wasted no time getting down to business. Throwing a slide of a golden-yellow flower on the screen, he asked whether anyone knew its name.

"I'll give you a clue," he said. "The initials are K.A."

"King Alfred!" we all exclaimed.

"King Alfred," he agreed. "The biggest hoax going."

It seems the original King Alfred, apparently a wussy bulb of small stamina, hasn't been produced in commercial numbers for years. In fact, what we buy at the nurseries every fall under that name is Unsurpassable, or Arctic Gold, or Dutch Master.

In Mr. Heath's opinion the very best "King Alfred" today, if you can find it, is Marieke - "large, showy, green-eyed, up-facing," he enthused, making the flower sound a bit like a streetwalker.

Gladiators' Fare

The room was pitch-dark as Mr. Heath ran through 165-odd slides, but you could hear the sound of pencils scribbling. I learned a lot. Did you know daffodils can withstand temperatures down to the low teens? Come February I shall be looking for blooms of Rijnveld's Early Sensation, which we saw on the screen standing tall and proud under a cap of sparkling snow.

Daffodils are pest-free, Mr. Heath reminded us, because the bulbs taste terrible. I knew that, but I didn't know the bulbs were narcotic as well, nor that Roman gladiators used to eat them when death was close.

I also found out that except for aesthetic purposes it's not necessary to deadhead daffs (whereas with tulips it's imperative); that Sprite, of all things, may help prolong the life of cut flowers, and that sprinkling Epsom salts around in the fall brings out color.

Taking Notes

Also that golf tees stuck in the ground are handy for remembering where the daffodils are, once the foliage is cut (not till it turns yellow).

Jack Lenor Larsen is a tall, imposing man. For this event, he was wearing knee-high black gardener's boots, loose-fitting canvas jodhpurs in a well-washed greeny-fawn, a loose gray sweater with a bright coral serape thrown over it, and a cinnamon beret. He looked like one of his own beautifully designed textiles.

He wandered ahead of us as we made our way through LongHouse's 16 acres, stopping every now and then to yank up a weed. By the time we got back to where we'd begun, he had quite an armful.

Mr. Heath named everything as we went along. I wrote down two glorious pinks to buy that have been in cultivation almost 100 years, Louise de Coligny and Mrs. R.O. Backhouse. Along with most everyone else, I also put down Acropolis, a double white with red touches that looks for all the world like a tree peony.

Late Bloomers

One woman kept near Mr. Larsen's elbow, pestering him with a barrage of questions. He answered her patiently, looking only a little bit imposed-upon. He has 20 varieties of birch trees, he said, and 60 more on order. Actaea, a dependable "pheasant's-eye" perennial, is one of his great favorites. Yes, LongHouse is open during the week, on Wednesdays from 2 to 5 p.m.

An astonishing number of daffodils are still in bloom there, not just the Poetaz varieties you'd expect at this time of year. The most ubiquitous is Thalia, a delicate white-white with two or three flowers on a stem, often called the orchid daffodil. There were veritable drifts of Thalia, snaking through the woods, peeping out from beds of ivy or lady's fern, or partnering floozier varieties like Golden Lion.

A few skeptics said not to bother going to Saturday's tour because there wouldn't be anything to see. It's tulip time, they said; the daffodils are long gone. They were wrong.