Snowdrop Mania: –
In the UK, right now, the horticultural world is about to drive us all mad with snowdrops. Pictures of. Articles about. Gardens with them. Anything people can think of to bash us over the head with snowdrops.
So I thought this year I would join in and help drive everyone barmy. Although I am notorious for screaming ‘no more snowdrops!!!’ on social media. Because snowdrops will be being flogged everywhere.
Snowdrops are pouring down!!!!!
I guess it’s about desperation, because there is comparatively little to go on about at this time of year here. You will soon get articles about hellebores, though never quite as many as about snowdrops. Never mind the endless pictures of them. The Next Best Big Bore then is Chelsea, which we’ll forget about right now. We deserve some respite.
And, there are, in this country, people known as galanthophiles: “enthusiastic collectors and identifiers of snowdrop (Galanthus) species and cultivars.” They crawl about in the worst of weathers gawping at flowers which rarely manage to exceed about two or three inches in height. Getting very over excited and prepared to pay hundreds of pounds for a squidgy little bulb.
It’s not as though snowdrops are an ideal obsession, being so low down. Yep, there are miserable photographers crawling about on frosted ground, trying to get an angle on a flower three inches high. Sometimes snowdrops go mad, spreading themselves everywhere, making it really hard to get that pic without squishing a lot of them and presumably getting shot for your pains.
Yes. It’s a wow. But I sometimes wonder – would we be so wowed if they were bits of polystyrene packaging, which could look quite similar….
And, you know, sacrilege to say so, but they’re not terribly different from one another. If people are going to go bonkers writing about roses or dahlias they have lots of differences to make for some relief – a variety of colours, singles and doubles, little and very big, and so on. But truly a snowdrop really looks like a – snowdrop. Especially for those of us who don’t relish getting down and up much.
Snowdrops, looking like….snowdrops… courtesy of Charles Hawes
John Sales snowdrops
Well, we made a visit once to the great gardener, John Sales, who has two things that make some people envy him.
One I can cope with, obviously, – lots of snowdrops in many different varieties. The other is harder – he has a prehistoric ditch. I get acute history envy even remembering it. Imagine! Phew. His friends get a mega buzz from the antiquity and some (labelled) snowdrops at the right height.
Snowdrops on a prehistoric bank!
Wye Valley Sculpture Garden
And today we went to see the amazing display of snowdrops at the Wye Valley Sculpture Garden. Yep, really. Millions of snowdrops. Us along with most of Monmouthshire. The snowdrop spread is simply staggering. Even to a snowdrop skeptic like me. Over 70 varieties (!) and most are labelled. And although a lot of seeding clearly goes on, you can also see, if you look carefully, that someone (Elsa Wood…and maybe others) have carefully divided overcrowded clumps and replanted all the separate bulbs:
Look carefully….
Well, some of them do look a bit different, even from above:
These look like this, if you turn them up:
And Charles, of course, had a great time.
Though he didn’t kneel down, of course..
Tea Time
And here is the sculptor and instigator of this welcome to the garden:
Gemma Kate Wood, sculptor and tea lady
Who well deserves applause for a great afternoon out for us and the rest of the county. She was serving tea and cake today to happy visitors (people kept smiling when we met!)
Yep, him again.
Am I going to soften up on snowdrops??
I envy you for snowdrops. What a gorgeous outing. We’re iced over and weeks away from snowdrops. I’ve not got much of a collector’s DNA. I failed as a youngster with Buffalo head nickels. I took my small collection up to the drug store, after a few months, and loaded up on bubble gum. No regrets, but I should have learned my lesson. There were some scrawny woods at the end of our suburban neighborhood, where I spent most days, and there were thousands of common and beautiful snowdrops every late February. I loved their purity. Sixty years later, I briefly got caught up in pricey cultivars and bought a half dozen before Bitcoin skyrocketed. I planted them, marked them and forgot about them. All but one perished from neglect. Where did I plant them? Labels were faded. I was in my 60s and the memory bank had begun to fail. I have one that survived my senescence. ‘Beth Chatto’ is a Graham Stuart Thomas selection of Galanthus plicatus var. plicatus that he found at Beth Chatto’s garden in the 60s. Prostrate leaves and fat blossoms with bracts like hoop skirts. Said to be vigorous. Mine are not. ‘Beth Chatto’ is rarely available (I check occasionally) and priced like platinum. I am just as happy with the common snowdrops. They’re a lot less worry.
Ah, no worry but real pleasure – that’s the thing. I’m no collector either. You have to be able to do labels and plant names and that just is not possible…. Hope you don’t have to wait too long for the ice and snow to go and snowdrops pop.
Omigosh, THANK YOU for writing what I have often thought, about snowdrops! I was beginning to think I was some kind of horticultural heretic, lol. That said… I do have a few of the oh-so-common Galanthus elwesii scattered in a couple of places where I can see them from my car and I go in and out of my driveway, as a February nudge to my brain that YES, there actually CAN a visible flower in winter BEFORE the Eranthis finally show up in March.
And I admit to thinking that it would be VERY nice indeed to have one of the “autumn flowering” varieties (Barnes, Potters Prelude, or Standing Tall) underneath Camellia ‘Winter’s Snowman’ whose buds will turn to brown mush after the first serious November freeze. But certainly not for the $60+ PER BULB price that they were available for, for the few nanoseconds before they were sold out. And it’s not like any of them would look any different than the common ones I’ve already got….
It’s a nice little plan you have there for them, when you grow rich…..
Oh we definitely have our galanthophiles here. What we rarely have is tea rooms in gardens. 🙁
Frugality limits any thoughts of participating in the galanthophile game. However, the sight of a hillside, woodland, etc.. covered in snowdrops is a miraculous thing, and I am meticulously and slowly filling my woodland garden with them by grabbing any offered at swaps and dividing into onesies as soon as possible. It will take me years, but I’ve found with snowdrops (or at least my appreciation of them), the key is en masse. En bloody masse actually. More masse the better.
What a wonderful day out. – MW
It was a wonderful day out and the snowdrop growers are such good friends and such good growers.
But don’t forget the polystyrene effect……
Yes, and why DON’T we have more tea rooms in gardens?!
As possibly the only garden open to the public in the UK which doesn’t do teas, I am not qualified to comment on anyone else’s failures in that department.
Spare a thought for the benighted photographers who have to do close up of these pesky little things! Far worse when we used to use very slow film when it was nigh on impossible to get a sharp image cos the slightest breeze would make them move. But even with the flexibility of digital camera you still have to crawl on your hands and knees or even prone to get alongside the b_ggers . They are the worst of plants!
Maybe you should call for a photographer boycott of snowdrops?
Growing up our spring bulbs were daffodils.As a kid I crawled around looking for their little green noses poking through. (And this was before I read A Secret Garden.). Snowdrops we’re not a common plant in our area. I remember seeing my first clump at a house where I was squatting down to make friends with their cat. I instantly liked them. Bought my first bulbs at a chain store. I have them all over the place. The common ones. I still get down on my knees to smell them. They smell like honey. If we get a warm day the bees come out for them in February. Right now the patch by the front porch which started to bloom last week is under a huge pile of shoveled snow. When it melts , the snowdrops will be blooming and as happy as can be. Which is one reason why I like them. Little toughies.
Toughies is good and they clearly must be, to have managed to become so ubiquitous. (Hence lots of people’s need for special ones…)
Well, my family loves snowdrops. But I do have sympathy for the photographers’ knees. A lovely idea is to plant the snowdrops in a pot (or even transplant it to one) and then place the pot on a huge horizontally placed mirror (or a mirror topped end table or tray) so you can see the flower without contorting yourself. And I suppose you can always carry your own little mirror like one in a compact, so if we are talking about other people’s gardens you can still see them without too much discomfort. But in Massachusetts where I live the Fair Maids of February are fairly likely to be too shy to appear before March.
Yep, it’s a good idea to get them to come to us. And that’s a sweet way.
Is squidgy a real word? And I will blatantly show my ignorance but what is a prehistoric ditch? I think you might need snow to have snow drops so I have never seen even one. I really enjoyed your rant!
Not sure about squidgy, but I like it.
A prehistoric ditch is one dug by people living in prehistoric times – ie before written history. A long long time ago. This one was very big and deep, so it’s still there.
But you don’t need snow to see snowdrops – you just need to find some somewhere!
Thanks for your kind words. Xx
And, yes, “squidgy” is a real word, according to both the OED and Merriam-Webster. (I.e., it works on both sides of the pond.)
“Squidgy” is a real word, and wonderfully descriptive, as well, as it means squashy or soggy or moist and pliant. And “squidge” actually means “the sound made by soft mud yielding to sudden pressure” — you can just hear it, can’t you?
Good and yep.
I love this too. And why all the snowdrop frenzy, when there is winter aconite, which (A) has color and (B) faces upward? Is it the absence of a zillion varieties to collect? Or are the corms insufficiently expensive? I’m a Yank but I spent a year at New College Oxford, decades ago, and I can still summon up the vast expanse of Eranthis coating the ground under a huge — I think it was — beech tree. And their foliage disappears so much sooner than Galanthus. Hard to establish in my climate, but they’re slowly spreading.
Ha – could be because some of us can’t grow them, for neither love nor money! Lucky you.
Yes, winter aconite is wonderful! I drove through Ithaca NY last spring and was absolutely floored by a lawn that was covered with Eranthis! They are stunning. I added some to my garden last fall and am eagerly awaiting their display.
I was happy to have found a patch by the stone wall the year we moved in. Ten years on I decided to divide the clump. OMG that was tough. Put out several bulbs throughout the beds. We’ll see what happens. I don’t envy the job of the ‘on your belly’ photography. Charles have you tried a selfie extension?
I don’t think selfie extensions work with a big heavy professional camera. But I think he may be feeling he’s done his share of snowdrop pics. At least digital cameras can cope with breezes, so it has got easier.
I have a “like”/hate relationship with snowdrops. They do look good with the winter sunshine on them. But, once the brief flowering period is over we are left with green shoots which hang on for months. When a blooming clump appears in an unexpected corner of the gravel path, it does bring a smile to our faces. But as suddenly as they appeared the blooms die and we’re left with a clump of grass-like shoots mingling with the shoots of grass that is starting to colonise the gravel path. What do I do? Remember the brief moment of happiness they brought or grub them out along with the tufts of grass?
That’s a tough one, with no easy answer……….
A.,
Since you’ve alredy used the word, “barmy”, I am forced to observe that some are just plain “potty” over Galanthus (Galanthii?? . . . trying hard to remember my high school Latin and the plural form of things). At first, I made mild fun of the Galanthophiles . . . because the differences were so slight, only a mother could distinguish among her children.
Oddly, though, I found it was precisely the delicacy of the differences that drew me in to more closely inspect things. And the more I did, the more I became engaged. So . . .sigh . . ., I have been sucked into your world.
In a perverse way, I am thankful that the selection available to us colonial gardeners is limited. Otherwise, I woud be spending beaucoup de bucks for some of the hundreds of variations that you seem to have available in the Mother Country. I must be content with having the 4 or 5 variations commonly available over here.
Regards,
J.
You are right. It seems clear that there is no end to them here, and if more of us crawled around examining closely there would no doubt be hundreds more. They are incontinent plants and best beware of their lure.
Oh wondrous word choice here: “incontinent plants!” I’ll be laughing for days, Anne.
O, do! Xx
I laughed out loud at your polystyrene comment–and completely agree! But I must say I’ve never been over fond of white flowers. Give me a naturalized lawn of blue muscari any day.
And if squidgy isn’t a word, it should be!
Or a wood full of bluebells? 🙂
My blue springtime lawn is thanks to many years of Scilla siberica dividing happily. They’re dainty things but I adore them en masse. Last year I fell in love with puschkinia scilloides, delightful white and blue blooms that smell of blueberry candy. Now I am dreaming of a lawn full of them!
Lawns full of flowers – brilliant.
Oh yes I so agree ! Who needs small white flowers after a bleak winter? Give me colour!
Yey!
I’m here to speak up for hellebores. I’ve already taken a couple of dozen pictures of my January-blooming flowers, the ones that look exactly like the ones I took last year and the year before. Soon my single patch of snowdrops will pop out and I’ll take the obligatory pictures of that too. I know they’re not much but they cheer me up during these dark, cold winter days while I wait for spring.
I am in love with hellebores and, maybe like you, take pictures of the same ones over and over. And worse – the very same people whose snowdrops we went to admire have about an acre of hellebores as well. Prompting much hellebore envy!!!
I definitely have hellebore envy which is my own fault for never buying any! I think they are pretty enough plants, especially en masse, yet I can’t seem to get past the sticker shock when I look at prices! For the price of one, I could plant hundreds of bulbs or buy several seed packets for winter sowing perennials. I’m sure you could convince me that hellebores are worth the investment.
Snowdrops looks so amazing, if it weren’t for the cold I’d wish to snow all the time.
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They’ve performed poorly for me in Texas, so I just enjoy the Instagram photos until they get to be too much. I always find myself wishing they would throw in some Spanish Bluebells for relief.
Spanish bluebells are one of the few no go plants here – we’re trying to keep our native bluebells. (don’t examine my garden though, please…)
Daffodils, Snowdrops, Hellebores, Hyacinths. Bring em on! I am so ready for Spring.
They are on their way…
This article made me laugh, I love a good garden rant, thanks!
O, that’s set me up for a happy weekend… !
Your snowdrop rant was fun to read – I still appreciate them. You can throw in some aconites to get the yellow color going…..I live outside of Boston – our winters have been getting slightly warmer and the snowdrops, aconites and hellebores are having a wonderful party starting in March.
Huh – aconites???!!!! They don’t like me! Haven’t succeeded in growing a single one. So I’ll stay purist and all white until hellebore and daffodil time. O – crocuses do ok though – just in a different place.
Glad to hear you can get away with throwing aconites. (mind you, I probably planted mine….)