Unexpected Guests

The amateur biologists were sitting around the garden the other day watching the grass grow and talking about the remarkable performance the oldest daffodils have been putting on this spring. The record snows of two winters ago had to have something to do with it, all agreed.

Like childhood friends who move away, are almost forgotten, and suddenly pop up at a wedding or class reunion to be greeted with more affection than the people one sees every day, this spring's show features unexpected guests not encountered in years but all the more happily met. Not only in the formal garden but all along the roadsides and at meadows' edges, slender-stemmed flowers planted by another generation of gardeners, pale standards of Edwardian refinement, have returned.

Who put them in the ground? Did they ever think they - and their venerable bulbs - would live this long?