Shortly after 9/11, a Dutch bulb grower was talking on the phone with one of his best New York customers, the garden designer Lynden Miller. He told her how sad he was about the deaths at the World Trade Center. And in a sympathetic, if pro forma way, he asked if there was anything he could do.

Flowers, replied Miller, who is famous for her restorations of Manhattan's Bryant Park and Central Park's Conservatory Garden. Tulips, Hans van Waardenburg suggested. No, Miller said, daffodils, because they come back reliably every year. And, the city being what it is, because rats don't eat them.

By mid-October the boxes started coming, adding up to more than a million bulbs by the end of that fall. Van Waardenburg's family firm, B&K Flowerbulbs, was the principal donor; the city of Rotterdam (a city bombed in World War II) donated 500,000 as well.

The boxes went out to New York's schools and libraries, and mainly to parks. I was working as a Parks Department gardener. By the beginning of November, I was planting my 20^th box of 100 daffodils, cramming some into a narrow strip of park on Second Avenue (at 21^st Street). People who passed by said how good it was to see someone doing something normal. When three of my siblings came for Thanksgiving with their families, I forced them all to get out in Carl Schurz Park (86^th Street and East End Avenue) to plant 300.

With so many bulbs to get into the ground, all did not go smoothly, of course. The volunteers—many of them schoolchildren and church groups—did not always dig down the required 6 inches. And practically all of them planted daffodils in rigid straight lines, no matter that the supervising parks gardeners kept yelling about curves, crescents, clusters, bunches. But we covered the bulbs' noses with inches of compost and they came up fine in spring 2002, though some marched in military formation.

Amazingly, van Waardenburg continues to donate 500,000 bulbs a year to New York City. He pledges to do so as long as there are volunteers to get them in the ground. Lynden Miller's New Yorkers for Parks distributes free bulbs to those who pledge to plant them in a public space. In the fall of 2001, Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe envisioned a ribbon of yellow winding through the city every spring. That has happened. The daffodils are not only coming back year after year. They are multiplying.