This Flower Could Be Secretly Sabotaging Your Bouquet

There’s a reason why the daffodil also has the genus name Narcissus. In Greek mythology, Narcissus was obsessed with his own image and rejected all other lovers. The same can be true for daffodils — they might not mix well in your vase with other flowers — or so a Reddit thread recently informed me.

There are several varieties of daffodils, “like hundreds of different versions,” Eka Dara, a florist with 20 years of expertise and the owner of Edelweiss Floral Atelier in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, says. According to the American Daffodil Society, there are between 40 and different daffodil species, and tens and thousands of hybrids. Prevalent and easy to grow as they are, I learned that if you mix daffodils with other flowers in a bouquet or arrangement, it might kill them. Gasp!

Because I love making my own floral arrangements at home, I decided to put this to the test.

I used two Trader Joe’s mixed bouquets I scored for $5 each at Trader Joe’s and added daffodils to one and not to the other.

It wasn’t a perfectly controlled experiment because the flowers in each vase didn’t match 1-to-1, but I wanted to see if the daffodil vase would start wilting more quickly than the other and which flower types (if any) would be most and least resilient to the daffodils. 

I used approximately the same size vase, the exact same amount of water, and about half a packet of FloraLife Crystal Clear flower food, which comes with the TJs bouquets, in each. 

The daffodil vase had some early drooping after two days in the vase but not much, and the flowers that drooped the soonest were the poeticus daffodils (the non-trumpeting ones) and the smaller pink flower, which I think is Lady’s Smock. (Mostly I was just stunned by the big bloom of lily on the left!) 

As it turns out, the better experiment to do would be one comparing daffodils from the store mixed in with other cut flowers and one comparing daffodils from the ground with other cut flowers. Here’s why.

In short, yes and no. Daffodils are “poisonous for other flowers at the beginning, when you’re cutting from the ground,” Dara says, so this is really only a watchout if you’re growing daffodils from the bulb in your yard or cutting them from a garden and dropping them directly into a vase with other flowers, not if you’re buying a bouquet.

Chemist Andy Brunning, who runs the website Compound Interest, says daffodils contain poisonous alkaloid compounds (they’re poisonous to pets), and “alkaloids are present in daffodil mucilage, too,” he writes. “It’s almost like a gel,” Dara describes, and it can kill other flowers in the vase and even be harmful to your hands, if you have sensitive skin.

If you’re cutting daffodils from outside, put them in a vase by themselves for a couple of hours by themselves before adding them to an arrangement, she says — problem solved. 

You can also change out your flower water frequently to prevent gel-buildup and wear gloves when working with freshly cut daffodils to prevent the gel from getting on your hands or on any other plants you might touch. However, if you’re buying from a florist or even a grocer like Trader Joe’s, Dara says, the daffodils will have soaked in water by themselves, removing much of that mucilage.

Since daffodils bloom in the early springtime (sometimes as early as February!), Dara recommends pairing them with other spring blooms — her personal favorite combos are lilacs and tulips. (The carnations in my vase still look great over a week later, so I’d recommend those, too!) As long as you soak the daffodil stems in water beforehand, Dara says, you should be fine to pair them. 

She steers away from pairing “the big heads kind of dominate,” she says of peonies, but that’s purely a personal aesthetic choice and not technical, she adds.

For more information (and inspiration images) on daffodils, check out the American Daffodil Society and daffseek.org.