Snowflakes for summer
Confused with snowdrops, denied as being a British native, Leucojum have had a chequered history. Mark Griffiths celebrates this misunderstood, but brilliant garden flower
Leucojum are brilliant garden flowers, says Mark Griffiths
The flowers hovered: dazzling white bells with an emerald spot at each petal tip
ON a day in May, sometime in the 1770s or 1780s, the botanist William Curtis was exploring the Thames-side between Greenwich and Woolwich when he encountered a plant he’d never expected to find. Although bulbous, it was flourishing amid reeds and marsh marigolds, ‘just above high water mark’, he recalled. Standing in sheaf-like clumps, its leaves resembled a daffodil’s in shape, but were deep glossy green.
Over them, hanging in clusters from 2ft-tall stalks, the flowers hovered: dazzling white bells with an emerald spot at each petal tip and yolk-yellow anthers that were revealed by the breeze’s ruffling.
Before long, he witnessed these blooms again—this time, joined in a dance of breathtaking brightness and delicacy along the muddy shore of the Isle of Dogs.
This was Leucojum aestivum, a species that, in England, had only ever been recorded as a garden plant, one that first became popular with Elizabethan horticulturists, who imported the bulbs from its native countries in Continental Europe. And yet the specimens that Curtis had found were, he contended, ‘undoubtedly wild’ and growing ‘where no garden, in all probability, could ever have existed’.
He commented: ‘For my own part, I am perfectly satisfied of its being a native of our island, and have no doubt but it will be found in many other parts of it.’ He announced these discoveries in Flora Londinensis, his botanical survey of the capital and its environs. At the same time, he proposed a new English sobriquet for this unlikely Eastender.
The genus Leucojum derives its name from leukon ion (‘white violet’), an Ancient Greek catch-all label for various whiteflowered plants that weren’t truly Viola or related to it. Up until Curtis’s day, this genus included species such as his Thames-side finds and their similar-looking relations, the snowdrops. Then, in 1753, the Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus moved the latter into a separate genus, Galanthus.
This left a few Leucojum species, to one of which, six years later, Linnaeus gave a new name: Leucojum aestivum—aestivus meaning ‘flowering in summer’, which this plant does in Sweden, although, in England, it can bloom as early as April.
Feeling that its English alias ought to reflect this partition, Curtis offered a coinage of his own: ‘In our gardens, it is generally known by the name of the great Summer Snowdrop; but… we have thought it necessary to give it the new English name of Snowflake.’
More precisely, he called L. aestivum Summer Snowflake and so it remains, a phrase as paradoxical, incongruous and meltingly lovely as the vision he beheld on the Thames all those many May mornings ago. Discovered in the Eastern Carpathians, Leucojum Podpolozje is a superb selection of L. vernum var. carpathicum, a variety that differs from the typical spring snowflake (L. vernum) in having flowers spotted with bright yellow rather than green The seedpods and seeds of Leucojum
aestivum can float. Water disperses them among its favoured wild habitats: the banks of rivers, streams and ditches; flood-prone woods and meadows. The seeds that gave rise to Curtis’s discoveries might well have travelled downriver from any of the numerous London gardens that had bordered the Thames in the previous two centuries.
In the 1780s, he didn’t really have enough evidence to assert that his finds were native rather than naturalised. Only later did his case begin to strengthen, as new sites came to light further inland, along the upper Thames, the Avon in Wiltshire and their tributaries, in places with little or no known history of gardening. A snowflake seed is not a salmon; it cannot swim upstream. These plants, it seemed, were wild.
The most celebrated of these sites are on the River Loddon in Berkshire, where
L. aestivum colonises banks, creeks, swamps, islands and marshy meadows. They are pure enchantment, these multitudes of nodding Naiads, when seen mirrored in the slowmoving water or carpeting the Stygian stands of alder. Little wonder that another name for this species is Loddon lily, that it once played a part in local May rites or that, by popular vote, it is now Berkshire’s county flower.
That the summer snowflake is truly wild along the Loddon appears to be confirmed by its occurrence in similar habitats in Ireland. There, ecologists have concluded, it’s native.
In recent decades, botanists have transferred almost all other Leucojum species to a different genus, Acis. Leucojum aestivum now has only one companion left:
L. vernum, the spring snowflake, so named because it blooms throughout February and March. In mild winters, this species may be out by the end of January, in time for the feast day of the patron saint of virgins and gardeners, hence its other English name: St Agnes’s flower.
Leucojum vernum is native to a region that runs from France and Germany deep into Eastern Europe and the Ukraine. As a garden escape, it has naturalised elsewhere, Britain included. Unlike L. aestivum, it is not a water nymph, preferring soil that’s damp, rather than deluged. It’s also shorter and squatter than its summer counterpart, between 6in and 1ft tall.
Its flowers are larger, however, as much as an inch across, borne singly or in pairs, and shaped more like a bowl or a mobcap than a bell. Typically, they’re white with a bright-green spot that sits just below each petal’s pearl-like tip, but, in some variants, they’re spotted with yellow rather than green. The Eastern European var. car
pathicum, for example, has furnished some gleaming garden treasures—forms with calcite-white flowers trimmed with luminous lemon or radiant gold.
There is still time, just, to buy and plant snowflake bulbs this season. Alternatively, they can be bought, in pots and growing, next year, knocked out of their containers straight away and put into the ground. As long as it’s in cool, moist earth, the spring snowflake thrives in sun or shade. Its green-spotted kinds—typical L. vernum and var. vagneri (which bears larger flowers in pairs, sometimes as early as New Year’s Day)—naturalise readily in woodland, shrubberies and rough turf. In the garden here, we also use them massed along a wall as the sole accompaniment to a mixture of evergreen ferns— a monochrome of captivating contrasts.
The golden-spotted L. vernum var. carpathicum merits more look-at-me placing: in tufts through winter borders, for example, among lacquer-stemmed dogwoods, hellebores, Cyclamen coum and other earlyblooming bulbs.
Also deserving prominence are some of the L. vernum selections that snowflake aficionados have been making of late. Among the most covetable of these cultivars are Butter Churn (flowers with 8–10 citron-tipped petals apiece, discovered and named by John Grimshaw at Colesbourne Park in Gloucestershire), Green Lantern (flowers lantern-shaped, petal tips long, forward-pointing, brushed with jade, selected by Joe Sharman of Monksilver Nursery near Cambridge), and Podpolozje (flowers large with bold sulphur spots, named for a village close to the Carpathian fastness where this plant was found).
The summer snowflake (L. aestivum), likewise, will grow in sun or shade and most damp soils. It flourishes, however, in conditions that resemble its natural habitats: meadow that floods; the margins of ponds, lakes and streams; even with its bulbs under shallow water, as when it’s containergrown and plunged in pools.
In 1924, William Robinson gave the name Gravetye Giant to an especially robust, tall and floriferous form that he grew at Gravetye Manor in West Sussex. This cultivar remains widely available and unbeatable. In our garden, it’s naturalised in grass that’s sodden all winter. Taking over soon after its co-colonist
Fritillaria meleagris finishes, its flowerheads sway and shimmer with a purity and gracefulness so mesmeric and rare that they might indeed be snowflakes in summer.
They are pure enchantment, these multitudes of nodding Naiads, mirrored in slow-moving water