The Murderous Flower: Are daffodils as evil as everyone claims?

Hi from the farm! This week brought the first of the true spring flowers: tulips and daffodils! But by some cruel trick of nature, these co-stars of early spring are not friends in bouquets. If you've ever cut a daffodil bloom, you might remember that they produce a sticky sap that runs from the end of the stem. This sap is referred to as mucilage in fancy circles, but sap will do just fine for us.

Daffodil Malle Pink - One of the new fancy daffodil varieties growing on the farm this year 

Unfortunately for tulips and a few others types of flowers, this sap zaps the life out of flowers with which daffodils share a vase. I found a nifty graphic online that dives into the technicality of the daffodil's murderous strategy, but the summary is that daffodil sap kills tulips when daffodil stems are cut and immediately added to a vase of other flowers, especially tulips. This sap contains alkaloids - read poisons - that are absorbed by the tulip stems as they take up water. Once absorbed, these poisons wilt tulips quickly, in my experiments, overnight will do it; and the worst part is that the tulips (known for their long vase life and resilience to revive themselves after storage/wilting) can't recover.

Daffodils also kill roses but through a different method. Roses are killed or suffer from immature wilting when arranged with daffodils because the sap is full of starches which serve as extra food for waiting bacteria, and raising the bacteria in the water isn't any better for flowers than it is for us. That bacteria then blocks the flow of water into the stems of roses, starving them and causing wilt or premature death. This is a slower process than the toxin-causing death of tulips, but still not how you want to treat your bouquet! Wilted flowers are usually (I'm thinking Morticia Addams, here) not the goal.

Okay, so where do we go from here? Is it just impossible to put these flowers together in arrangements? I've seen it done before when the flowers seemed to appear just fine - what's up with that?

Well, some folks argue that if you cut the daffodils, whether in the field or to arrange, you can leave them in a separate vase to let their stems cure. This curing usually takes at least four hours and essentially allows the stem time to seal itself over so that no more fresh sap is released. After you've allowed the daffodils to cure, you can dump the sappy water, rinse off the stems, and add to a bouquet as you normally would. But do not - under threat of death to the other flowers in your bouquet - recut those stems without removing them from the arrangement and repeating the curing process.

Daffodil infographic from @compoundinterest

I offer this warning about daffodils because I do love the look of daffodils tucked into tulip arrangements: their forward facing cheerfulness contrasts the tulips' vertical cup-shaped flowers with perfection. And this week, that contrast became a possibility on the farm! I picked the first tiny bunch of tulips this week - pure wedding white shorties, only about 8 inches tall. The first blooms are always the shortest, but I still love them in a pint jar, tiny crystal compote, or tulipiere.

While I doubt that tulips will color up by the weekend (I'm writing this in the wee hours of Friday morning), I am checking the tulips multiple times a day because tulip harvest windows for picking tulips for their ultimate vase life are pretty small, and as always, I want you to get have the best blooms for as long as we can shake it.

So, just know that before I added those daffodils to your tulip arrangement or the stray pint jar on my counter, I made sure they had plenty of time to keep their sap to themselves, first, and sometimes friends just need a little extra help getting together, especially when they're both spring divas like these!

Our first tulips of the 2025 season - shorties but goodies!

So there you have it! You CAN include the murderous daffodil in your arrangements, but it requires a bit of forethought that I'm confident we can handle. Have questions or want to share your experiences or experiments? Drop a comment below. I'd love to hear from you!

xo,

Hannah

*Much of this blog post was shared in our weekly newsletter, Notes from the Farm. If you'd like to receive articles like this delivered straight to your inbox, be sure to share your information with us via this link! Thanks for reading!