What a Wonderful World

'Roberta Watrous 7Y-GYP'

I picked these daffodils yesterday from a little patch in the bed by my driveway.  They are among the very few I continue to grow out of several hundred varieties I grew about 15 years ago, when I maintained a collection of “novelty daffodils” for competition in daffodil shows, sponsored by local societies across the country and in the annual national show held by the American Daffodil Society in a different city each spring.  These blooms are by far not the most impressive flowers I ever grew, but I treasure them nonetheless and here’s why. 

The registered name of this flower is ‘Roberta Watrous 7Y-GYP’.  All show flowers must have either a seedling # assigned by the hybridizer or a name officially registered with the Royal Horticulture Society in London, England to be judged on a show bench.  This flower was named by a woman in Indiana to honor a well known daffodil grower and miniature hybridizer, Roberta Watrous, who lived in Washington, D.C.  Many thought then, and probably even now, it was a pitiful choice of flowers to name for someone so renowned in the daffodil world, a celebrity, as it was, on three continents.  But, the RHS doesn’t argue merits, it only accepts names and codes as they are presented and if they are unique, since no two flowers can bear the same name. 
The later being the sad part, because once the name was taken, it was stuck on this little flower forever more and none more beautiful or show worthy could take its place. 

I met the real Roberta Watrous only once before she died when I attended the national show and convention in Baltimore.  She came one afternoon pushed in a wheel chair, just to see the flowers one more time in her fast fleeting lifetime. 

It wasn’t actually until several years later that I ever saw the flower by that name and it was not on the show bench, but wasting away in a glass coke bottle, used to transport blooms to the venue by a friend of mine also long since deceased.  The national show was open to the public and flowers from Northern Ireland, England, and a variety of US states were on display in the hotel ballroom, flowers so beautiful they would take your breath away with their form and color.  Yet, here in the quiet of my friends’ hotel room, looked over as a potential show bloom, there sat ‘Roberta Watrous’ as pretty as could be.  It took this still quiet room, away from the crowd, to appreciate it.  To see the delicate tone of its petals and the soft shading of its rim.  Nothing bold about this flower.  No screaming at you from across the room, just a small pale blossom very easy to overlook.

Why was it even there, you may wonder.  It has a unique “color code”, the numbers that follow the flower name.  This matters because one of the classes in competitions calls for 15 different flowers with 15 different “color codes.”  ‘Roberta Watrous 7Y-GYP’ just happens to have that to its credit since very few other registered flowers are a match for that description.  Description?  Yes, that’s what the code tells you.  Y = yellow petals, G = the color of the base of the cup, Y = the middle of the cup, and P = the color of the rim.  It doesn’t matter if you agree with that assessment, it only matters that it passed muster at some point in its registration process with the RHS in London.  Just so you know, P stands for pink and that can be any number of shades of pink and G stands for green. 

The only people now who grow this flower are “daffodil nuts” as I once was, or who are old enough to remember Roberta and want her namesake in their garden.  Sadly, it is a finicky flower and doesn’t “do well” for many, not liking their soil or the moisture content, or light or who knows.  Daffodils can be as hard to please as a cat that refuses to eat.  Consequently, ‘Roberta Watrous’ the flower, is seen less and less and less and may someday be extinct.  For the time being it continues to grow happily in my garden, popping up its head each spring, reminding me of the fond memories of my daffodil growing hobby, and proving always that beauty can be observed in a multitude of things if we slow down long enough to notice. 

Staying indoors during this crisis has hopefully helped us all to appreciate the little things in our lives that go unnoticed most days and focus on the parts of the universe that whisper to us that indeed there is a Creator and we are in His hands.