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N. biflorus
Why Not Join the NZ National Daffodil Society? National Daffodil Society Secretary Mrs Denise McQuarrie 26 Greenhill Road Ngatimoti RD 1 Motueka 7161 New Zealand (03) 526 8847 Email: natdaffsec@paradise.net.nz Web: http://www.daffodil.org.nz/
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Join the Otago Daffodil Group A group of friendly daffodil enthusiasts who meet in early spring for staging and judging nights, along with the popular autumn bulb sale and a meeting looking at twin scaling and other reproductive forms of daffodil cultivation. Meetings held at Green Island, near Dunedin. Trevor Rollinson (03) 454 4612 Email: rollin@ihug.co.nz
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For the perfect spring Daffodils for garden and exhibition
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Noeline and Donald McLaren, 124 Mercer Road, RD 1, Balclutha 9271, New Zealand – mercervaledaffs@xtra.co.nz
About Us
Mercervale Daffodils grew from a lifelong association with growing and showing daffodils and today is a modest hobby business offering daffodil bulbs for the garden, naturalising and exhibiting and to promote appreciation of this wonder spring flower.
I have my parents to thank for all this! My mother’s earliest memories featured daffodils. She fell in love with the flowers when very small, standing amongst a drift of the fragrant, late flowering tazetta (Narcissus biflorus – see photo top left).
My mother began exhibiting daffodils at the local spring shows in 1950 when she and Dad, daffodils and two children squeezed into the front of the old Ford V8 pickup truck, and headed to their first spring show. They were hooked, and ‘daffodil fever’ ensured that, until her death in 2003, not one show season passed without her exhibiting her favourite flower.
When I married, a number of named exhibition varieties were given to me and in time, I too became infected with ‘daffodil fever’. From then the passion for daffs has grown and includes dabbling in hybridising in a very small way. Mercervale Daffodils is named after our farm situated on Mercer Road, Waitepeka in South Otago which is in the lower east coast of the South Island of New Zealand. We came here in 1990 and named our farm ‘Mercervale’, in honour of the Mercer family who first settled here in 1865. Donald is the 5th generation to live on and farm this land.
It is fortunate that we own a farm as the number of varieties we grow has well and truly outgrown the vege’ garden!
Spring 2003
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Webmaster/Designer – N A McLaren