Performance of different narcissus cultivars in Izmir ecological conditions

Commercial narcissus production in Turkey is mostly carried out in Izmir, Mersin, Adana and Samsun provinces and predominantly favours the multi-headed tazetta cultivars. On the other hand, the Netherlands and Great Britain, as the leading narcissus producing countries, especially breed and export a wide range of trumpet, large-cut, small-cup and double cultivars which demonstrate full adaptation to colder climates. In this research, realised in an open field belonging to Ege University’s Bayindir Vocational Training School, cool climate narcissus cultivars were examined in terms of their floral quality in Mediterranean ecological conditions. For this purpose, 22 different Narcissus cultivars were scrutinized through a set of visual criteria for their sprouting and flowering time, flowering duration, stem height and width together with the amount and diameter of their flowers. The cultivars demonstrated rather different outcomes. Thus their 20% sprouting times were between 16 and 37 days from planting (with ‘Precocious’ and ‘Cheerfulness’ being the extremes); the 20% flowering times were within 70 and 94 days from planting (‘Tête-à-Tête’ and ‘Strong Gold’ being the earliest and ‘Precocious’ the latest) and flowering duration was between 16 and 38 days (‘Actaea’ and ‘Salome’). In addition, stem lengths varied between 19.6 cm (‘Tête-à-Tête’) and 48.5 cm (‘Golden Harvest’) and stem diameters were between 0.55 cm (‘Tête-à-Tête’) and 1.48 cm (‘Carlton’). The largest flower diameter occurred on ‘Sempre Avanti’ (12.1 cm) and the highest number of flowers per stem were found on ‘Tête-à-Tête’ and ‘Cheerfulness’. Therefore, this research showed that most cool climate narcissus cultivars can adapt successfully to Mediterranean ecological conditions suggesting that the cultivars used in landscape projects and the floriculture industries in Turkey could be extended.