"Daffodil lady" brings joy to gloomy spring

Glenda Johnson's mass-plantings brighten banks of Lake Sacajawea

Nothing brightens a dreary spring landscape like a showy spread of golden daffodils — like the 1,500 that are trumpeting color and joy at the north end of Lake Sacajawea this month. 

They are the contribution of a community newcomer, Glenda Johnson, whom I’m going to call “Longview’s daffodil lady.” Glenda bought and planted them last fall.

“They bloom at a gloomy time of the year, and we need something cheery to look at,” Glenda told me Tuesday. “And the squirrels don’t tend to dig them up.“ (Daffodils are poisonous.)

“I just did it to give people joy.”

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Glenda Johnson with some of the 1,500 daffodils she bought and planted at Lake Sacajawea last fall.The Japanese Garden Island is in the background. Below, Glenda examines the daffodils blooming along Ocean Beach Highway. (Andre Stepankowsky photos)

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The display flanks Northeast Nichols Boulevard and Ocean Beach Highway, where the daffodils join blooming forsythia in a sunburst of yellow.

The daffodils have helped cheer up one of the coldest and wettest springs the area has had in years. It’s been so successful that Glenda plans to duplicate the effort by planting another 1,500 this fall at the southeastern end of the lake next to 15th Avenue and along Nichols Boulevard.

She’s reminding people to let daffodil foliage die back naturally after the blooms fade so the bulbs absorb energy to sustain and multiply.

Glenda, 62,  is a member of the Longview Parks Board, but she sought and received explicit permission to plant the bulbs. Sometimes passersby looked at her suspiciously when she dug them in last fall, sometimes assisted by her Old West Side neighbor Diane Pond. Some walkers stopped and asked if she was planting onions or potatoes.

The Puget Sound native is herself a relatively new planting in the community, having moved here with her husband, David Knoyle, in January 2020, during the early days of the pandemic. They both worked for Boeing in the Kent and Renton factories, and her father also was a career Boeing worker. 

They moved to Longview because it checked all their retirement boxes: It has a small college. They loved the Longview Library (Knoyle is on the Library Board). It has golf courses. It has many parks. It is walkable.

“I don’t have to drive to go to the grocery store.”

Glenda says she is not a “super gardener,” but she knows plants and is an advocate of composting, wishing the city would adopt a yard waste recycling program.  Planting the bulbs last fall came naturally to her for another reason, though.

“Volunteering has always been important to me. I can’t sit around and do nothing.”

The rewards of her daffodil effort  — which cost her about $800 — are most palpable when she watches pedestrians approach the profusion of yellow flowers.

“People seem to smile when they walk past.”

Anyone who wants to help Johnson expand her Lake Sacajawea daffodil plantings this coming fall can email her at glendaluj@yahoo.com.