STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK

The late October sun rising in the east above the foothills streamed through the trees at the Sawtooth Botanical, illuminating dozens of people at work in the dirt.

Six months from now they hope to return to see a carpet of daffodils heralding their efforts as the yellow flowers welcome spring.

“If everything goes well, we’ll have the first-ever Wood River Daffodil Festival on Mother’s Day weekend, the daffodils showcasing the renewal of spring as we come out of the cold dark days of winter,” said Marty Lyon.

Lyon, a landscape architect and former board president of the Sawtooth Botanical Garden, proposed the festival as a benefit for The Senior Connection and Sawtooth Botanical Garden.

This week he acted like a field marshal general, strolling from one group of planters to another as he showed them how to plant 33,000 daffodil bulbs that had been bought with an $11,000 donation from the national AARP organization.

“Every four inches you want a bulb six inches deep,” he told Randy Flood and Phil Doerflein, who were among 15 representatives of Windemere who had answered the call to plant.

“Is there a top and bottom to these?” someone asks.

“Pointy end goes up,” responded K.O. Ogilvie.

The three-day perennial plant-in brought members of the Hailey Rotary Club, who helped plant a COVID Memorial Garden in honor of a fellow Rotarian who had died from COVID.

It brought out a few mothers of Sun Valley Community School students, students from Sage School and Silver Creek High School, as well as volunteers with The Senior Connection and Sawtooth Botanical Garden,

A group of home schoolers learned about things like roots as they planted, said Nicole Fuentes, one of the parents. And 33 students and two parents visiting the Garden of Infinite Compassion ended up planting bulbs while there with a little nudge from Marty’s wife Mila Lyon, a former home economics teacher.

Two fifth and six-graders from Syringa Mountain School helped plant the final bulbs around the Sawtooth Botanical Garden sign at Gimlet Road and Highway 75, posing for a picture when they’d finished.

“It was so much fun because of the camaraderie—people smiling, happy to get the chance to participate,” said Marty Lyon. “The effort exceeded my expectation.”

Connie Hoffman pulled two long taproots out of the ground.

“This is what we’re up against,” she said. “But this is going to be beautiful. It will awaken us to a new world and remind us how life goes on. When I read that this was going to happen, I told my husband I had to wake up early because I was going to plant bulbs!”

There’s no telling how many of the bulbs will come up, or in what configuration since some planted them a couple inches apart and others a half-foot apart. But Lyon figures even those planted sideways will strive to grow past the three inches of topsoil volunteers covered each with.

Come the first week of May, he says, there will be a series of festival events, including donor appreciation parties, daffodil bouquet giveaways and lots of photo opportunities.

“It’ll be awesome,” he said. “I’m hoping by then that COVID will be behind us and people will be able to sit on a bench at the Memorial COVID Garden and reflect on what we’ve gone through the past few years. And I hope we will celebrate life as we look at these daffodils.”