New Yorkers for Parks' Daffodil Project is the one of the largest volunteer efforts in the city’s history. It launched as a living memorial in remembrance of the victims of 9/11. 

This fall marks the project's 20th anniversary and an opportunity for healing, resilience, and recovery for the city. This year’s project memorializes the victims of 9/11 as well as the victims of COVID-19. 

We believe that parks are how this city heals. The Daffodil Project offers a moment for hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers to reclaim their parks and plant hope together. 

Since 2001, New Yorkers for Parks (NY4P) has distributed over 7.5 million free bulbs to be planted citywide by more than 400,000 young students, parks and gardening groups, civic organizations, corporate volunteers, and others. Bulbs are planted in public spaces across the five boroughs to spread beauty and hope across the city. 

Key partners include Con Edison, New York Forever, Berlin Rosen, and JCDecaux. 

 

Your support is essential to making the Daffodil Project a reality! NY4P gives away bulbs for free, which would not be possible without our generous supporters.

Sponsorship Opportunities

Our corporate supporters underwrite NY4P’s substantial costs in organizing and sustaining this citywide volunteer effort, as well as purchasing bulbs, which are given away for free. 

The Daffodil Project is especially focused on areas of the city that do not have the capacity to generate private or philanthropic dollars. Your support helps bridge this gap, to commemorate the victims of 9/11, and beautify spaces for residents to enjoy.

To find out more about sponsorship opportunities, please contact Audrey Landale at alandale@ny4p.org

 

If you’re interested in receiving or planting daffodil bulbs, sign up for our newsletter. 

Registration opens in late summer of every year. To learn more about how it works, check out our Resources and FAQ page. 

 

The Daffodil Project wouldn’t be possible without the help of our partners. 

We would like to especially recognize Con Edison, key supporters of the Daffodil Project since 2003. Other corporate partners include New York Forever, Berlin Rosen and JCDecaux.

Additionally, our distribution and outreach partners are NYC Parks, Partnerships for Parks, and New York City Housing Authority.

 

Like most New Yorkers in the fall of 2001, NY4P Board Member and public garden designer Lynden Miller was grieving in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, when she received a fax from Hans van Waardenburg, a Dutch bulb supplier with whom she had worked for many years.

"He had written, 'I feel so distressed and heartbroken for New York. New York and my country have had a long relationship going back to New Amsterdam. ... I just wish there was something I could do,'" Miller told the New York Daily News in 2011.

"And I sent back, 'Hans, you don't have any extra bulbs, do you?'"

Around the same time, Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe had a similar idea: planting yellow daffodils – the color of remembrance – across the city.  

Then the ship arrived in New York Harbor, one of the very first after the harbor reopened, and with it, a gift: one million daffodil bulbs from van Waardenburg and the City of Rotterdam.

That fall, more than 10,000 volunteers joined NY4P to initiate the Project. In 2007, Mayor Bloomberg named the daffodil the city’s official flower in recognition of the millions of daffodils that had bloomed every spring since 2001.

Today, the initiative remains a powerful memorial to the victims of the September 11 attacks, and its spirit is defined by the thousands of New Yorkers who join together to make their neighborhoods, and their city, a more beautiful place to live. 

 

Interactive map of all 2019 season plantings of the Daffodil Project℠.