We salute you, Queen Daffodil.

It is so good for you to make an appearance every spring. How do you survive so well, and look so great in spite of your age?

We are impressed that you keep coming up by the roadside, a healthy reminder of fields long ago plowed under and developed with crops of houses.

We get a lift in early March when the first yellow blooms give a promise of the warming and greening to come.

We love to welcome you in multiples of thousands, as the early flowers give way to the later blooms.

We are sorry to tell you goodbye each year, although you have paved the way for more leaves and flowers of many different colors to appear.

And we are so, so glad that Gloucester County honors you each year with a festival of your own.

This year we salute Gloucester Daffodil Festival Number 30, a worthy successor to the first festival in 1987 and all the ones that followed. Only once, incredibly, was this festival cancelled … because of a late-falling snow!

Finally, w...