Environment: When Poetry Was in Flower

"Ten thousand saw I at a glance,/ Tossing their heads in a sprightly dance." That was in 1804, when Poet William Wordsworth effused over daffodils in his poem "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud." The daffodil fields near Wordsworth's home have since been thinned by hungry sheep and marauding tourists. Now Britain's National Trust is considering planting hundreds of bulbs to restore the fields to their daffodil-rich condition.

The project comes amid a squabble over just where the daffodils originally bloomed. While tradition places them near Wordsworth's Lake District home in northwest England, a Yorkshire tourist board insists that the immortalized flowers actually grew some 85 miles away. That argument, however, has not taken root among Lake District officials, or at the National Trust.