Description
‘Pedestal’
2W/Y-Y
[Incomparabilis Bicolor 2b]
(Crosfield, E.M., pre-1908)
The 1913 R.H.S. Daffodil Year Book described ‘Pedestal’ as “one of the best flowers for a garden and also one of the best for the show table. It has wonderful lasting properties and the perianth always remains quite flat”. We are in full agreement a century later. The perianth, which is soft primrose-yellow on opening, soon passes to cream-white, stained bright lemon-yellow at the base. The outer perianth segments are broadly rounded elliptic; the inner broadly ovate near the base, and much tapered towards an acute tip. The margins of each segment recurve as the flower fades after weeks in flower alongside most of the Poets. The sunproof neat corona of solid egg-yolk yellow, which opens almost straight, becomes a slightly flared funnel at maturity. The sparse but regular pleats create a gently ruffled rim. Brimful of poise, it is a beezer of a daffodil, with a slender flag-pole of a stem literally head and shoulders above other cultivars bred in the early twentieth century. Faintly sweetly scented.
