Have patience; when it comes to digging daffodils, waiting two months can save two years.

I suppose garden experts should appear impartial and feign adoration for all things flowery, but my all-time favorites, hands down, are cheery, deer-proof daffodils. I savor the three dozen or so kinds in my Jackson garden, mostly from my American Daffodil Society great-grandmother’s old Delta garden.

They do so well that, for posterity’s sake, every spring I move a few to an old cemetery just north of the state Capitol for visitors to enjoy for generations to come.

And by the way, call them what you want – even buttercups – but all daffodils, including trumpets, paperwhites, doubles and jonquils with their thin, quill-like leaves, are officially Narcissus.

There are many hundreds of great cultivars, but most do not perform well in Mississippi. When choosing new ones for my garden, I carefully select those I believe will flower dependably for decades. It’s a sad fact, but like tulips and true snowdrops, the original King Alfred and many of the other daffodils sold by the bagful in garden centers are mostly one-shot wonders in our mild winters and short springs.

Here’s the rub: Daffodils need at least five or six weeks after normal flowering time to grow new bulbs and form flower buds. If they are dug or cut down – or braided – before then, they will usually skip a year of flowering. That’s why, no matter how tempting it is to dig some I see blooming in abandoned home sites or along roadsides, I usually take only a photo or a small bouquet.

When I come across some in need of rescuing, or when friends offer me some of theirs, I mark their location and return later, when the foliage has died down or at least turned yellow and flopped over, before digging and dividing them. As I mentioned at the top of this article, it’s better to wait six weeks to dig than two years to bloom again.

If you don’t have easy access to heirloom varieties growing nearby, there are more than three dozen I know of that you can order online that will sprout faithfully and flower for decades – even on the coast, where few do well. I keep a free, emailable list of these dependable kinds, including those we see returning year after year, spreading and naturalizing. Visit felderrushing.blog and click the “email me” link, and I’ll send it along.

Meanwhile, if you come across some abandoned daffodils you simply can’t resist — and you have permission to dig them (not in cemeteries, please; remember, Santa Claus is watching) – mark the bulb location, cut a bouquet for instant gratification, and return later to rescue the bulbs.

Felder Rushing is a Mississippi author, columnist and host of “The Gestalt Gardener” on MPB Think Radio. Visit his blog at felderrushing.blog. Email gardening questions to [email protected].