Every snowdrop speaks of new hope
There’s nothing like a stroll among carpets of white Lerwick, Anglesey Abbey, Merlin and Jacquennetta to lift post-winter spirits
GOODNESS, at this time of year we do need some cheering sight – these dreich weeks after Yule, the trees quite bare, the country dead and still, and little ahead to bestir us save our taxreturns and Lent.
But as January advances, the snowdrops arise, knuckling up from the forest floor and in the slopes by sleepy lanes. First dainty buds and then, within a few days, the nodding and understated flower.
If you are very lucky, and in the right sort of woodland, there may be great drifts of them – they love each other’s company – caught on the undulating ground by winter’s slanted light, as white birds on the foam of the sea. Then you know that winter has turned.
I gaze in wonder down and round a curving woodland path, past clump upon crowd of shy white flowers, each little congregation most subtly different and each pegged with a different varietal name – Anglesey Abbey and Neil Fraser, Shackleton and Chedworth, Peg Sharples, Margot Fonteyn, Merlin…
‘You know,’ I say honestly, ‘only last year I thought there was just one sort of snowdrop.’
Fay McKenzie, of high responsibility in these gardens, is on her knees vigorously potting yet more snowdrops in a wheelbarrow, but she shoots me an incredulous look. Keri Ivins, my guide for the afternoon, chuckles broadly.
And, by my shoulder, Lady Erskine, sixtysomething wife of Sir Peter, Sixth Baronet of Cambo, winces for a nanosecond.
No one in all of Scotland knows more about snowdrops than Lady Catherine Erskine and though, in these weeks of earliest spring, many grand gardens open their gates for the Scottish Snowdrop Festival, the greatest of all is Cambo, a serene estate by Kingsbarns on almost the eastmost cape of Fife. The foliage of galanthus (it means ‘milk-flower’) is not so much green as a glaucous blue, like January cabbage; its bloom not so much white as pearly. This is a plant that announces itself with a modest cough, adored for its subtle beauty, endurance, and as the tenacious harbinger of spring.
It’s startling to learn that snowdrops are not actually native to the United Kingdom. Their demesne is central Europe, as far east as Turkey and Russia. ‘One of the earliest references to them in Britain,’ says Lady Erskine, ‘is John Gerard’s Herball of 1597.’
She cuts a dignified figure in long coat and greened hat, glancing sidelong at you with eyes of the most vivid blue.
‘By the late 1600s they were becoming more widespread in gardens,’ she says. ‘And then in the 18th century great estates began their plantings, those wonderful carpets of snowdrops we see today.’
Though long naturalised in such gardens as Cambo, even today – like the pheasant – the snowdrop is not truly wild. Where sighted, you can be sure that someone deliberately planted it – or its kin – very close by.
For so unassuming a flower, it is extraordinarily tough, undaunted by frost, able to punch through lying snow and unruffled by winter storm. ‘They actually have their own antifreeze,’ says Miss Ivins, ‘a solution in their heads – they can handle extraordinary cold.’
‘But they don’t like lawn,’ murmurs Lady Erskine. ‘They struggle with the compacted grass. As you can see here, they’re happiest growing in the leaf-mould, under deciduous trees.’
Though 19 species of snowdrop are known, she explains, only three are in general cultivation – nivalis, elwesii and plicatus, each with a distinct arrangement of leaves.
But there are more than a thousand named varieties and more still being discovered. Devotees even have a name – galanthophiles. In February 2015, one paid a cool £1,390 – plus £4 mailing – on eBay for a single bulb of galanthus plicatus ‘Golden Fleece’.
‘It’s a wonder there isn’t snowdroprelated crime,’ I muse. ‘Oh,’ says Lady Erskine gravely, ‘but there is. One poor woman, well, she appeared on television, so proud of these really rare snowdrops. And, the very next day, gone. Someone stole into her garden by night. That very night. The whole clump, just dug up.’
Snowdrops are big business here at Cambo. Thousands visit through February and March to see drifts of the flowers through its dells and woods – some 70 acres of woodland.
The estate sells snowdrops in great quantity – live and ‘in the green’ at this time of year, and damp-packed bulbs in the autumn. I ordered some myself, in 2011, for my garden in Lewis, where they have taken doughtily to Hebridean conditions.
ANNUALLY, Cambo Estate typically sells more than 150,000 plants, and snowdrops are a frisky lot, ‘always having lots and lots of babies’, beams Miss Ivins. A little clump soon becomes a big one and, every three or four years, should be divided by spade and the thinnings replanted.
Given the sheer scale of snowdrops at Cambo, there are abundant plants to spare for sale and they should reach you, by post, within 24 hours of being dug. You can have 25 galanthus nivalis for only £10.50 online.
Watchful, still, Lady Erskine talks me through this neat, brief, snowdrop walk where special varieties are sign-posted. Lowick has a distinct and pretty yellow ovary. Anglesey Abbey has unusually bright green leaves, while the flower of the Merlin is completely green inside. Jaquenetta has curled cream-and-green petals as involved as those of a rose, though Lady Erskine pauses in particular affection by the undeniably splendid Mrs Macnamara, tall and white and elegant.
‘She’s a very good snowdrop,’ she enthuses, as if talking of a beloved Labrador. ‘Very tough; always comes up very early – this winter she was in bloom by Christmas.’
I’m startled to learn that it is believed bulbs of the Brechin variety were first brought to that Angus town by soldiers returning from the Crimea. ‘It seems so unlikely,’ I say. ‘Men in chill and dreadful conditions, fighting far away, but thinking about their gardens.’
‘But wouldn’t you?’ asks Lady Erskine. ‘Homesick, in that grim situation, and you see those lovely little flowers? I think that’s exactly what men would do. They would pine for domesticity and try to bring something home.’
The loveliest of all snowdrops here, though, is Lady Magdalen Erskine – grandmother of Sir Peter. The 9th Earl of Erskine, in the early 1800s, brought snowdrops to Cambo. But it was that redoubtable chatelaine who, in the years after the Great War, plastered the grounds with them.
By 1933, the snowdrop displays at Cambo had attracted newspaper attention. And, though Lady Erskine’s garden is absorbing indeed, it is in the informality of Cambo’s woods that the snowdrops seem best.
They roll down mossy hills by the winding burn. They march along dykes and bob in the thin winter breeze and there is a particularly lustrous sweep by a gap in an old wall, where I stand and gaze over fields of stubble to the distant spire of the parish church.
It is February 1, there is the scent of imminent snow in the air and the silvery sun is already setting, but all those indomitable little flowers are fast marshalling against winter and, already, it beats retreat.
Lady Erskine and Miss Ivins show me around magnificently rebuilt Victorian glasshouses. In season, they grow peaches, nectarines and grapes. Then we do a round of the walled garden, admire specimen trees and a splendid Cotoneaster Cornubia, still lustrous with red berries.
Indeed, Cambo’s gardens merit a
visit at any time of year and their entire lack of leathery rhododendrons (most unusual, for Scotland) is a signal virtue.
I am immersed in the family history – related in an excellent display at the visitor centre – when I hear Lady Erskine calling cheerfully for ‘my Daily Mail man’.
We stand over an interactive table-map of the estate and discuss its economics. Cambo is no sequestered, private indulgence. It has been open to the public – central to the local community – for many years. For decades volunteers (including many St Andrews students) have helped in these gardens and acquired invaluable horticultural skills.
They support, too, 13 full-time jobs; the ‘Big House’ another 14 and, as well as high-end accommodation, it is now a sought-after wedding-venue. Lady Erskine points out that the fine new golf club, on links leased from the estate, provides 60 to 80 summer jobs, while the new Kingsbarns Distillery – its first dram can legally be sold this year – offers considerable employment, too.
She and Sir Peter moved out of Cambo House in early 2015. They now live at Cambo Farm and the estate is run by their son, Struan, and his wife, Frances. The gardens remain very much Lady Erskine’s domain. (Staff fondly, if incorrectly, refer to her as ‘Lady Catherine’.)
Dignified and unassuming, she is very much behind the irrepressible sense of fun that bubbles throughout the estate. The woods are scattered with assorted fairy furniture and little doors in trees; they are, apparently, home to ‘Glingbobs’ and ‘Tootflits’.
The restaurant in the delightful – and recently restored – Cambo stables is cheekily called The Nosebag, and dogs are most welcome.
Past 4pm, the place seethes with children, for today is St Bride’s Day – or Imbolc, on the old Celtic calendar – and as dusk falls there is to be a bonfire and sausage-sizzle, marking the birth of spring.
Youngsters are choosing a living snowdrop of their very own to take home. ‘Choose yours,’ Miss McKenzie urges a little girl. ‘It will be special, because you are special.’
DRIFTING back towards the woods, I lock eyes with a magnificent golden pig, securely penned. She resumes exuberant rooting and, by her vast belly and swollen dugs, is evidently a fallen woman.
‘Oh, Apple? She’s a Tamworth,’ says Lady Erskine, once more materialising from nowhere like the shopkeeper in Mr Benn. ‘We have two sows, and they’re so useful – they root up the ivy but never touch the snowdrops.’
I want to see the sea, as yet unglimpsed from this serene dell, so take a walk east by Cambo House and past still more cascades of snowdrops. Suddenly I am out of the woods and on the beach by the breaking waves of receding tide and amid golden evening light.
I remember the old story – how, after Adam and Eve were cast out of Eden, she collapsed to the ground and wept inconsolably, until an angel caught a floating flake of snow and cast it to the ground with a blessing.
From it the first snowdrop flowered – and, as children everywhere might be told, hope was born.