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The Easter lilies have come forth! Along Southgate, where it winds behind St. Ann's Academy, they hang their pale heads and shyly bloom towards the earth.

The daffodils, too. The lilies were almost lost among them. I probably shouldn't admit this, being a son of St. Dafydd (or anyway grandson), but I've never much liked daffodils. They're weird, abstract, constructed-looking flowers. They look like musical instruments or light bulbs or something loud and hungry. They're a fine cheerful yellow (and the two-tone ones are eggily cool), but for me they're mostly a signpost of things to come; I'm glad to see them because I know what's coming after.

When I was a child, I found brightly-coloured flowers too garish, almost painful to look at, and preferred subtler colours and smaller blossoms.

My favorite flower is the chocolate lily, also indigenous to this area. I like them because they are not really very pretty, but they are beautiful. And they're extremely cool, especially when the lighter striations are close enough that they start to look like a checkerboard. And of course the name.

I do like tulips, which come after and are just as bright as daffs, but somehow please me in their simplicity. I've grudgingly come to like ruffled tulips, but the plain, rounded, solid ones always seem more tulipy to me.

I tried to find images of early daffodils to see if I liked them better, and found that when you couple "daffodil" and "evolution" you get a lot of this:

The Evolution of Polymorphic Sexual Systems in Daffodils (Narcissus)

(Quote: "Narcissus, the daffodil genus, exhibits an unusual diversity of sexual systems," -- that's kind of hot.)

and this:

Why I'm not a daffodil

And so on.

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