The Little Garden Club of Rye (LGC) Daffodil Show gets more resplendent every year! Preceding the Nantucket and Greenwich Daffodil Shows, it attracts local daffodil growers and competitive exhibitors from all over Fairfield County and increasingly from areas as far away as Shelter Island and East Hampton!
This year, on Thursday, April 18, individual entrants and garden club members, from novices to experts, arrived with their freshly cut stems, perched at card tables and filled hundreds of test tubes with brilliant white, yellow, pink and orange blooms wedging them in place with sprigs of boxwood. Our favorite class is predictably the Historic Daffodils, a division which includes Classic cultivars along with pre-1940 specimens of the sort used by early 20th and nineteenth century landscape architects like Beatrix Farrand, Ellen Biddle Shipman and Mary Rutherfurd Jay.
Hundreds of jonquils, tazzettas, miniatures and narcissus of every petal shape and hue filled the Van Norden Carriage House (coincidentally commissioned in 1907 by a Dutch American family). The fragrance of spring permeated the air! A Youth Exhibitors category encouraged budding horticulturalists to enter – Campbell Steere and Julie van Roijen each took home several awards.
Congratulations to Daffodil Show Chair Jean Taplett, her committee, LGC President Cheryl Adler, LGC members and all the winners for sharing their exceptional green talents with the public and educating us all about the joy of growing these deer resistant beauties from bulb to bloom!
