Fifty words for snowdrops | Financial Times

I have yet to pick up speed in the garden. The rains have been torrential and the ground is not easy to work. Until late January there was hardly a trace of frost. While gardeners have been dithering, one flower has been compensating. Unlike the rest of us, snowdrops are having the best year ever. They were spared cold weather when their buds were preparing to open. All winter they have revelled in the wet.

I cannot let them pass unmentioned. Since the 1980s snowdrops have had ever more publicity. Long-established gardens with masses of snowdrops open early to gardeners who often travel miles to see some flowers in early February. Ever more variations have been noticed, named and put on the market. I try not to follow the herd and write on snowdrops in February as if there is nothing else to discuss. This year is different.

I have never been so pleased to see them. In the grey days of lockdown snowdrops broke the limits, pushed through the ground and reminded us that flowers will indeed return and that one day, restrictions will be lifted.

At the first sight of them on a bank by the roadside, I stopped, crawled to examine the interiors of the ordinary single flowers and gave them a
merited salute. I used to think that Wordsworth’s poem “To A Snowdrop” was a contender for the worst he ever wrote. This year it seems different.

In 1819, when critics complained he was losing the plot, Wordsworth
called the snowdrop “chaste”: most snowdrops breed promiscuously with one another and hence we have so many variations. He described it as bending “its forehead . . . like an unbidden guest”. Snowdrops sometimes appear where they have not been invited, but I never see shame or apology in ones that are hanging their heads.

Wordsworth never saw Galanthus Magnet, a fine snowdrop that has a long bit of green, or pedicel, linking its flower to its stem. As a result, Magnet sways in the wind, not like a gatecrasher but like a partygoer at a floral rave. It is an excellent choice.

Wordsworth was not done yet. “Venturous harbinger of spring” reads like a bad line of verse by Pam Ayres but “pensive monitor of fleeting years” saves the day. After 11 lost months of social activity, I look on the snowdrop in a similar light, as its flowers appear to consider the passing of yet another year. Snowdrops were flowering when I first took Covid seriously. They are flowering again when it has transformed an entire year. In Russia, “snowdrops” have become slang for the bodies of people who have died in winter on the street.

What does a snowdrop really, really like? It seems to vary. Experts grow
the most special varieties in raised flowerbeds, where they can be dressed with leaf-mould before flowering. Without experts, vigorous snowdrops spread in rough grass and in the dried bottoms of hedges or the circumference of tall trees.

For stronger snowdrops, the answer seems to be a damp soil in winter and spring when they are growing and flowering, and a dry soil in summer when they are dormant. Below tall trees or hedges they can dry out in summer and then enjoy the fallen leaves and rain in this millennium’s idea of a non-winter. They are usually supposed to dislike rotted manure, but a few gardeners reject this notion.

Nobody should risk a special snowdrop in competition with grass or tree roots. They need close inspection when in flower and they are too expensive. They belong in special beds shared with summer-flowering plants that do not overrun them. One of the most experienced sources of such snowdrops is Avon Bulbs near Somerset, run by Chris Ireland-Jones (avonbulbs.co.uk).

I am thinking of his superb exhibits at the RHS February shows, at which Avon Bulbs has won 30 gold medals. To judge from his newsletter, he may be thinking wistfully of the European snowdrop festivals, especially the one at Mannheim, which have been important for his business. The post-Brexit paperwork, the individual certificates of plant health and the demand to wash off soil from plants in transit disincline him to show the best of British snowdrops in Europe ever again.

Back home, snowdrops fit well into small or urban gardens. They do not like to live in pots for long. They are not fit for window boxes. They are excellent in raised beds or in ground partly shaded by a tall tree.

The poet James Fenton amassed an excellent collection of rare snowdrops in his Oxfordshire garden in the 1990s and wrote of compiling a portfolio of snowdrops. Sell Bitcoin and buy some named Galanthus: snowdrops multiply steadily and prices are not coming down.

Here is a sample. Bitter Lemons is a fascinating snowdrop with gold-yellow blobs on the outer segments of its flowers. It grows slowly but easily if it
is given open ground, slightly shaded, and if it is labelled and top dressed with leaves in late autumn. At Avon one bulb, supplied in the next few weeks still “in the green”, costs £90.

Lucy, with two lovely dark green markings, costs £55. Treasure Island, stunning with yellow markings, costs £125. Magic, which a great snowdrop lady named after her lurcher dog, costs £85.

In a special raised bed, build up a pricey portfolio and reckon the snowdrops will double every seven years. The compound growth rate will be 10 per cent per annum. It is at risk to your incompetence as opposed to rushes of market insanity. Meanwhile it is beautiful and wholly beyond a chancellor’s tax net.

Those prices are for the top rarities. Opinions still divide, but for such special plants I continue to favour buying in spring when the plants are still green. It is very important to buy only from a top supplier when ordering these named rarities, as others may well send incorrect stock.

For the rest of us, here are some good ways to go. Early-flowering Galanthus elwesii is a good one but not always persistent under grass: prices begin from about £40 for 100. Polar Bear is a fascinating variation in the elwesii group, one with good green markings on its inner tube, retailing at £47.50 for 10. Sam Arnott is an old and well-proven wonder, a robust and rapid snowdrop that will indeed put up with life under rough grass. If bought now in the green, three bulbs cost up to £15, but they multiply quickly and are my first choice among named snowdrops.

Hippolyta is an excellent double snowdrop with a green middle. Basic nivalis, the single white snowdrop we all know, costs about £22 for 100 but only, please, from suppliers who are not selling stock dug up from nature. Jacques Amand and Living Colour Bulbs are a reliable source.

I have a soppy French book of the 19th century in which the snowdrop, Perce-neige, talks to Spring, Primavere, in elegant French before dying in Spring’s warm caress. Perce-neige is illustrated in a sort of stripy ballet skirt. By mid-March most of the snowdrops’ dance will be over but they have never given such pleasure. Please, never call them “harbingers”.

Robin Lane Fox will be in discussion with gardener and writer Sarah Raven at the FT Weekend Digital Festival, March 18-20. For tickets go to ftweekendfestival.com

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