I’m no botanist, but I’ve noticed something kind of wild going on with the flora of my favorite East Bay residential running streets this budding spring: an abundance of daffodils.
Now, if you’re not from the Bay Area, daffodils making an appearance may be old hat. But I never saw these little yellow trumpet-faces growing out of soil until I moved to Oregon for college (go ducks!). I was downright amazed when I first discovered them in the Spring, along with rows of multi-hued tulips like lines of lipstick colors at the pharmacy. (Curiously, the genus of which daffodils and stem from is “Narcissus.” So I had to know if tulips were of the same nomenclature based on their showy colors. They are not.)
Disbelief found me when I noticed daffodils popping up after the nominal rains this winter. First I thought it was just one gardener who had populated his lawn with the bulbs, not a fluke of any sort but seeds purposefully purchased and spread about. But as I have continued my ambling runs I have seen far too many yellow, puckered up petals hunting for sunlight in strange places (a small strip of land between lanes of a busy road, alongside the lake, poking up next to a dumpster) for their appearance to be planned. No, it seems daffodils have made their way into the habitat here.
I couldn’t help but wonder two things after noticing all this flower-power. First, does this influx of daff’s mean we’re looking at overpopulation of these bulbs in the area? (According to fifteen minutes on “the Google” I deduced the answer is no – or at least no one it terribly concerned about it to date.) Second, and more importantly since the daffodils aren’t overpopulating and wiping out other native shrubbery, would I have even thought to take note of the great daffodil debut had I not been a runner?
Cheesy to mention but impossible not to, running makes me more connected with my landscape, my community and the sum of the parts that make up the cities in which I often take off into.
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