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The most famous daffodils in English literature grew beside Ullswater. That much is certain. What is less often told is that William Wordsworth did not write the poem about them until two years after he saw them — and that when he finally did write it, the most precise and sensory description of what he and Dorothy saw on 15 April 1802 was not his but hers.
Dorothy's journal entry for that afternoon is worth reading in full before you read the poem. It gives you the daffodils as they were first encountered — specific, surprising, more modest than the poem's famous image of a host of golden flowers tossing their heads would suggest. We saw a few daffodils close to the water side, she writes. A few. Not a host. A colony on the shoreline, self-seeded from lake-floated seeds, smaller and more scattered than the poem's vision, and all the more beautiful for it.
The poem — I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, written in 1804 — transforms Dorothy's specific observation into something more universal. The daffodils multiply, the movement becomes more dramatic, and the solitary wanderer replaces the pair of siblings who actually walked that afternoon. This is what poems do. But reading Dorothy's account first, and then reading the poem, gives you a richer understanding of both — the raw experience and the art made from it.
The poem's final stanza — in which the daffodils return to the speaker's imagination during a later moment of solitude — is, in Wordsworth's own account of his poetic theory, the whole point. The experience is not the poem. The poem is what happens when the experience is recollected in tranquility. He was not, on the day, writing a poem about daffodils. He was walking with his sister in the rain.
The wild daffodils at Ullswater grow on the western shore, in and around Gowbarrow Park — now a National Trust property. The park is accessible from the road between Pooley Bridge and Glenridding, with a car park at Aira Force. The daffodils flower in late March and early April, typically for two to three weeks. The display varies year to year with the weather; a mild, wet spring is better than a dry one.
The daffodils here are the native wild daffodil (Narcissus pseudonarcissus) — smaller, paler and more refined than the cultivated varieties in gardens. One flower per stem, cream petals with a deeper yellow trumpet, nodding in the slightest breeze. They are not showy. They are extraordinarily beautiful.
The other famous Wordsworth daffodil site is Dora's Field at Rydal — the field Wordsworth bought and planted for his daughter Dorothy in 1830, now a National Trust property. These are cultivated daffodils, planted in thousands, and their display in April is spectacular in a quite different way from the wild Ullswater colony. The two sites are about fifteen miles apart and flower at roughly the same time.
On our Wordsworth tours, your expert storyteller explains the full context of both sites — the poem, Dorothy's journal, Dora's Field and the later story of Wordsworth's daughter whose illness prompted the planting.
Wild daffodils at Ullswater are seen on the The 10 Lakes Full-day Tour with Ullswater Cruise. Dora's Field at Rydal is a stop on the Wordsworth Morning Tour. Both are at their best in late March and April.