Description
This particular stock has been grown and offered as “Narcissus bulbocodium nivalis Morocco”, in the past (not by ourselves), but after reading a paper by Fernández Casas published in 1986 (Fontqueria 10: 9 (1986)), I began to have my doubts about the naming of stock which we were propagating but had not, at that time, ever offered for sale (so no-one ever got a wrongly named plant of this from us). I managed to find the original Fontqueria reference work from when the species was first defined. It then took me 2 hours of OCR, corrections and translations (from both Latin and Spanish) plus subsequent help from friends in both Germany and France, to work out the differences between the North African bulbocodium species of nivalis affinity. In our plants, the leaves were 2mm across (that was easy) and they are strongly D-shaped in cross-section as they should be. A razor blade and a microscope showed that they have 7 vascular bundles (and 2 external bundles), making this stock attributable to Narcissus jacquemoudii of Fernández Casas.
This does not, of course, mean that all Narcissus “nivalis” from Morocco are this plant (in fact nivalis doesn’t even grow in Morocco, it is exclusively Spanish). However our vegetatively propagated stock (though it is not clonal) has now been further examined and it is indeed Narcissus jacquemoudii. I say this as I have seen other plants collected in Morocco which are the closely related (and distressingly similarly named) N. jeanmonodii – do re-read and check here please, there are actually two different names !
It’s confusing even when you know that there are two similar names and two species which seem to differ only slightly to the naked eye, but jacquemoudii has lovely, bright, chrome/acid-yellow, hoop-petticoat Daffodil flowers, very early in the year. It flowers here in January and February, at around the same time as some of our cantabricus forms and late-planted bulbs of romieuxii. It is the very brightest yellow of any of the Narcissus species at this time of the year, grabbing the attention of anyone who sees it. It does well in pots here, in a well-drained, loam-based compost which can be acidic or limey, the plant seems to have no strong preference for either in cultivation. It is fully hardy in the frames but we like to keep a pot or two under alpine glass also. It is there that I was able to observe that the style is strongly exserted from the flower but that the anthers are not (or barely so and if so then with age only). In N. jeanmonodii both the style and the anthers are conspicuously exserted.
Propagated vegetatively only (not by seed) from an original collection made by R. & E. Franke many years ago, with their number 661 and the data “Montagne d’Oukaimeden, around 2,000m“. The bulbs were thought to be from the west side of the Tichka Pass, and this has now been confirmed. The plants illustrated are our actual stock, not a generic photograph.
Introduced to our listings and first sold March 2019.
