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!
Nancy Mott, of Greenwich, a former president of the Greenwich Daffodil Society and board member of the American Daffodil Society brought many of her prize winning cultivars!“Lily” is the Little Garden Club of Rye’s official ambassador of the show. Each year she is fancifully attired. Note her beekeepers helmet and honeycomb screens at her feet!Weeks of planning and hours of setup by LGC members include lining up water filled test tubes in wooden blocks so they are ready to be filled with entries.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 which include Classic cultivars along with pre-1940 specimens.Our favorite class is predictably the Historic Daffodils which include Classic cultivars along with pre-1940 specimens.And the winners are…Julie van Roijen entered a number of Dutch daffodils given to her by her grandmother in the Netherlands to plant in their garden at Rye. Marilyn Donahue explains the rules of entering to her as her mother Marie-Anne looks on.
