How to spread your snowdrops
The most effective, and cheapest, way to multiply snowdrops is to lift and divide them – and now’s the time to do it, says Monty Don
THE snowdrops were particularly good this year, not arriving especially early or staying later than might reasonably be expected, but while they were with us the garden danced with their mass of gloriously dainty yet bold little flowers. I say ‘were’ but I guess that those of you lucky enough to garden up in the northern extremes are still enjoying them.
However, for most of us seed heads are forming where the flowers once shone. Their display is done for another year and although the foliage is still growing strongly and, I think, handsomely, the hellebores, pulmonarias, daffodils, fritillaries, muscari, scillas and primroses are all jostling each other to delight the eye.
It is easy to relegate the spent snowdrops at this point but, as ever, in the garden, the best time to plan for more snowdrops next year is now, almost a full year ahead.
For some reason snowdrops, or galanthus, attract some of the most fervent, not to say obsessed, collectors who are prepared to pay astonishing prices for a single bulb – so for the past month, as happens every year, these ‘galanthophiles’ have been in a frenzy of admiration and collection. It is quite common for bulbs to go for hundreds of pounds apiece and a couple of years ago a single bulb of ‘Golden Fleece’ went for £1,390 on eBay.
But for most of us it is not the individuality of different hybrids that attracts us to snowdrops but the massed effect when they appear in winter; harbingers of spring and defing the worst of any weather. That massed effect does not need anything other than the common Galanthus nivalis to achieve perfection. Unlike new hybrids, which can take ten years or more to become numerous enough to be commercially available on even a very limited scale, G. nivalis is reasonably cheap. And once you have a good-sized clump, spreading the plants costs absolutely nothing.
Snowdrops spread naturally both by creating new bulbs within a clump and by spreading further afield by seed. You could let them do this in your garden and in time – quite a long time – you would have a lovely large drift of them. But you can speed up the process, and there are two ways of doing this.
The first is to plant them as bulbs and the best time to do that is as soon as they are available in autumn.
Although this is very cheap it is also a notoriously tricky way to establish them: I once planted 1,000 bulbs in my London garden and precisely 12 came up.
The second method – lifting a clump, dividing it and replanting – is a much better bet, and the time to do it is right now, just after the flowers have faded but before the leaves die back. All the snowdrops in my own garden have been spread this way from one original clump given to me by a friend from her garden 25 years ago.
The technique is easy. Gently lift a large clump with a fork and without going so far as to break it down into individual bulbs, divide it up into three or four smaller clumps with your hands. Plant these either in a brand new place or at the edge of the original group. Water them in well and they will immediately make themselves at home in their new position. Repeat this according to the number of snowdrops you already have. Not only can you expect a 100% survival rate using this method, but it will also give you a good idea of how they’ll look next year and enable you to plan other planting around them.