Welcome to Croft 16

Welcome to Croft 16’s website for the 2023 season / Fàilte gu Croit 16

We sell old daffodil bulbs – mostly antique varieties bred before 1930.

A little about us…

The vintage daffodil hybrids we offer for sale are bulbs surplus to our National Plant Collection® of pre-1930 daffodils, designated in 2010 by the charity Plant Heritage.  We truly believe that by making these historical Narcissus cultivars available to you we are improving their chances of survival.

Some of these veteran stocks are in very limited quantities, so we prefer to pre-invoice customers for what we are able to supply. We aim to lift bulbs from June to early July, and to despatch bulbs between late July and the end of August.

We do hope you enjoy browsing the site and find these venerable, unsophisticated but enduring flowers as charming as we do.

Good news on which to end: through more directed research, we have at last been able to identify a few of our more problematic stocks, some of which we have been puzzling over for twenty years or more! These include ‘Rugilobus’ (probably a selection from wild daffodils in Spain); Engleheart’s ‘Phyllis’; and Hartland’s ‘Mephistopheles’ and ‘Nectarine’. [All being well, if we can find the opportunity to draft the required descriptions we are hoping still to include the latter two in our 2023 list; if not, certainly for 2024.]

With best wishes,

Le gach deagh dhùrachd,

Duncan and Kate Donald

Kate amongst the daffodils, 3 April 2021


Croft 16 Daffodils under snow, 6 April 2021

Flowers corpsed by snow and gales, 7 April 2021

About Us

Croft 16 is a partnership, set up several years ago by Duncan and Kate Donald. Our principal business is selling surplus bulbs of heritage daffodil varieties.

Growing Daffodils

All the daffodils in our Sales list were bred at least seventy-five years ago; some more than 140 years ago, and a couple have been known for nigh on four centuries.

How Daffodils are grouped

Over 30,000 daffodil hybrids have been named. In order to furnish some idea of what any given daffodil cultivar looks like, a classification system was established as far back as 1909.

The Daffodil Names we use

All our daffodils will have perfectly good cultivar epithets, if only we knew for sure what they were. As we are very anxious to sell our stocks true to name, we would rather offer bulbs under a trade designation than under the wrong cultivar name.

© Croft 16 Daffodils: Images © Duncan and Sophie Donald | Daffodil sketches © Sophie Donald | Text © Kate Donald | Website by Roslin Design
All rights reserved: all content of this website, except the Order forms, may not be reproduced without prior consent of the copyright holder.

We have now closed our order book for 2023. Please contact us to be altered to new stock being available.

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