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| Photo 1: First Garden Daffodil 2024 |
First garden daffodil of 2024 photographed on 10th February (Photo 1). We did see the occasional daffodil on our recent visit (4th February) to The Weir Garden.
The earliest photo of a garden daffodil in 2023 was 19th February (Photo 2).
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| Photo 2: First Garden Daffodil of 2023 (19th February 2023) |
In 2022, the first appearance was on the 10th February ...
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| Photo 3: First Garden Daffodil of 2022 (10th February 2023) |
... and, in 2021, it was the 20th February.
In Figure 1, I have plotted the day in February when the first daffodil flower appeared (x-axis) versus either the mean February temperature or the mean Winter (December/January/February) temperature (y-axis). [Note: mean February temperature for 2024 is only up to the 10th]. With only 4 data points, we shouldn't read too much into the correlation and certainly not infer causation.
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| Figure 1: Correlation between February/Winter Mean Temperature and Date of First Appearance |
Temperature is only one of the factors that might influence how early daffodils flower (other factors might include rainfall, number of frost days, sunshine hours and ground temperatures). Nevertheless, the trend observed in Figure 1 - warmer temperatures encourage earlier flowering - is what we might expect. While the correlation coefficient (R²) is higher for the Winter temperature relationship, there are too few data points to read anything into this. Maybe next year?
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