What is it with snowdrops? Why do people make so much fuss about them, when they are so small and relatively insignificant? These are questions that mystify people each February, as they view yet more images in newspapers or gardening magazines of chilly, brilliant white, droopy flowers on short stalks.
I have, in the past, been equally stumped. However, gradually, two or three positive aspects of snowdrops have dawned on me, not all of which have anything to do with the flowers themselves. The first thing to note is that they flower (in the public mind, at least) mainly in January and February when there is not much else flowering (in the public mind, at least). Once newspapers took to printing colour images, and gardening magazines to publishing winter issues, there was always going to be a considerable, and sometimes undue, emphasis on flowers which, though individually insignificant, were certainly hardy and dependable and easily aggregated into large-scale drifts. As garden photography has developed in the last 20 years, so has the extraordinarily intimate nature of the images photographers capture and reproduce; snowdrops, being small, delicate and sometimes intricately marked, undoubtedly benefit from such close attention.
Moreover, the owners of a number of large country gardens, finding themselves with the need to encourage more visitors, have discovered that long-established drifts of Galanthus nivalis and G. ‘Atkinsii’ in woodland and borders, can become a popular draw with coach parties, thankful to have somewhere to go in late winter. Each year, more and more gardens open especially in February to show off snowdrops and aconites and, with luck, a few other winter-flowerers as well.
This small bulb, of the genus Galanthus, divided into 19 species spread across Europe, the Caucasus and western Asia, especially appeals to the botanist’s instinct in many gardeners. The species are divided, for convenience, into three types, depending on how the leaves emerge from the soil: applanate, explicative and supervolute. (These are words to roll round your mouth like a gobstopper.) Applanate means two flat leaves, explicative describes two leaves whose edges curl inwards, and supervolute is the description for those snowdrops where one leaf is wrapped around at the base by the other. These are vital diagnostic features, as are the fact that the leaves can be green, greenish-blue, or grey-blue.
The botanist’s instinct is piqued by the fact that some species, in particular the showy Galanthus elwesii, show variation freely, so that new forms are identified all the time. It is thought that there are now at least 500 cultivars in existence, and more will be discovered, especially in gardens where snowdrops have been established a long time.
Those people who fancy snowdrops are called galanthophiles and they have been around at least since late Victorian times, although it was probably E.A. Bowles (1865–1954) who coined the term. They are particularly numerous and active at the moment, finding good fellowship and the chance to exchange arcane expertise at ‘snowdrop lunches’ or ‘galas’ each February. They are a cultured lot, on the whole, so that new cultivars often have quite jokey names. There is, for example, a snowdrop whose inside petals have two green dots above a downward facing crescent mark, called ‘Grumpy’. There are cultivars of the autumn-flowering Galanthus reginae-olgae called ‘Miss Adventure’, ‘Miss Behaving’ and ‘Miss Demeanour’, while ‘Matt-adors’ has been named for one of the authors of the seminal work ‘Snowdrops’, Matt Bishop, who took a particular fancy to this strange form of Galanthus plicatus at a snowdrop gathering in 1999.
This snowdrop season has started disastrously for galanthophiles, I am sorry to have to report. That is because the important weekend of 8 and 9 February, when a number of organised get-togethers were planned, was memorable for low night temperatures (–9
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