snowdrops

Beside the mill is a single track road that winds around the coast, meandering from Southend to Campbeltown. As this road reaches the Conieglen water, it dips and narrows, flanked on each side by high grass verges, before crossing a small bridge. In summer, the verge grows tall, swaying heavily with vetch, cow parsley, birds-foot trefoil. Stripped back to its grey-brown bones in winter, by February it begins to emerge from the surrounding landscape in a bright wash of white – a gorgeous corridor of dancing snowdrops.

There are so many snowdrops here: all over our garden, around those of our neighbours, along the verges, across the high banks of the adjacent burn. I can see snowdrops from every single window, and they are such a cheery sight on these February days, which have been chilled by the east wind and dulled by a pall of cloud. There’s a particularly lovely swathe on the steep bank outside my kitchen window: they bob and nod at me as I make my morning cup of tea.

The sheer number of snowdrops hereabouts is evidently a combination of naturalisation and good gardening. In their hopeful abundance I can immediately see the hands of the mill’s former owner, lifting, dividing and dotting bulbs into every available patch of ground over the past twenty years. And while I am no galanthophile, I have spotted several different cultivars, single and double flowered. Equally beautiful individually, and drifting en masse, who could not see in the snowdrop a hopeful early sign of spring?

In these islands, snowdrops are the universally beloved marker of the start of winter’s end. Who brought them here from the near east? The Romans? The Norman monks, who began planting the tiny bulbs with their pure white flowers around their churchyards and monasteries?

Snowdrops appear in several extraordinarily beautiful early works of botanical illustration . . .

. . . and by the time Linnaeus classified them as Galanthus Nivalis (milk flower of the snow) in the middle of the eighteenth century, snowdrops had come to be regarded as the hopeful harbinger of seasonal change.

Mary Delany created wonderful paper cuts of double and single cultivars . . .

. . .while her contemporaries, Gilbert White and Dorothy Wordsworth, both recognised in the February flowering of the snowdrops the slow promise of English spring

As symbols of hope, purity, and spring, snowdrops became increasingly popular during the nineteenth century, when gardening really began to boom . . .

. . .becoming something of a British national obsession between 1870 and 1910, when Galanthophilia rose to its height.

By the fin de siècle, snowdrops were not only springing up around every garden, but on thousands of artworks, decorative objects, and ephemera . . .

. . . from ceramic plates and cutlery . . .

. . . to tiles . . .

. . . postcards . . .

. . . and cigarette cards .

In many late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century calendars, February’s distinctive aesthetic is captured by the snowdrop.

I particularly like this example from the beautiful calendar created by the Swiss artist Eugène Grasset, in which February is suggested by an industrious figure, well wrapped up against the cold, and hard at work pruning, surrounded by the bare branches and snowdrops of her walled garden.

For this gardener, as they are for me, the dancing heads of snowdrops seem to be an invitation to throw a warm coat on and just get outside . . .

. . . and make the most of February . . .

. . .whatever its weather is doing.

Read more about the work of Mary Delany in our Bluestockings book.

What are your own associations with snowdrops?