The most magical flower of them all
As devotees pay hundreds for a single snowdrop bulb, a joyous celebration of...
TIMES are grim. Ice and snow are threatening. And there’s the dreadful news, with murdering fanatics and world governments on alert against terrorists. And yet I have a heart-warming message from my back garden — the first snowdrops have arrived.
The poet William Wordsworth gloried in ‘a host of golden daffodils’, for others there is nothing to compare with a carpet of bluebells — burgeoning spring at its most glorious, the air charged with perfume and full of promise.
But no flower moves me as deeply as the snowdrop.
They bloom just as life couldn’t seem bleaker. Daffodils are just sheathes bent in the wind, crocuses nothing but blades in the uncut grass. But snowdrops pierce the gloom and stand up defiantly to the elements.
I always used to be desperate to run away at this time of year — anywhere, so long as the sun shone and the wind dropped. I’d see those pictures of film stars splashing about in Caribbean seas and be sour with envy as I trudged about in monolithic greyness, contemplating buying thermal underwear.
But not long ago, I moved out of the city to a place which can feel like the middle of nowhere. And this January, I know I’m not interested in the sun or the sea.
What has made the difference is that at the end of my garden is a wood with thousands of shoots of what the botanists call galanthus (from the Greek, gála for milk,
ánthos for flower — the traditional symbols of endurance and hope).
All OVER Christmas I wanted to see if any shoots had begun to break through the frost. But, as if performing some sort of pagan ritual, I told myself I could not start looking for snowdrops before the start of the New Year. Ridiculous, I know, but I thought that by rushing the spring, I might spoil something or bring bad luck.
On the first day of the year, I allowed myself to go back into the woods. I couldn’t see any at first, but then I began lifting the dead leaves. And there they were, the first leaf tips.
The green shoots were tiny, but over the days I saw more coming into life, forcing their way through the hard earth, with hints of white appearing between the leaves. Now a few have shot up and are hanging pure white flowers, perfect pendants, from long green stems.
And they, quite simply, make me happy. More than that, as I’m moaning on about the cold or everything else that’s wrong with the world, the thought that from all that brown and seemingly barren mud comes this thing of extraordinary beauty gives me an all too rare sense of wonder.
The snowdrop’s special magic is that, though it looks so delicate, so fragile and fleeting, it is actually as tough as old boots, strong enough to survive temperatures I find unbearable and then break through snow and ice to burst into bloom.
On her wedding day, the novelist Charlotte Bronte was described as looking like a snowdrop — appropriate for the writer who appeared so demure but whose heroines such as Jane Eyre were decidedly not.
Today it is not warm enough for many buds in my wood to open.
But in a week or so — snowdrops were known as Fair Maids of February because that is when they are usually at their best — the ground will be covered with so many white flowers that I’ll look out in the morning and have the illusion that it has snowed all night. The sight of that extraordinary forest flourish is inspiring, and not just for me.
In one of her wonderfully evocative novels, Winifred Holtby describes a woman dying of a fever in the raging heat of Africa. In her delirium, she yearns for snowdrops from the rectory garden of her past life in England, longing for their lovely clear coolness and for home.
They also touched Queen Victoria — she chose to carry a posy of snowdrops when she married Prince Albert in 1840.
The French writer Colette was another devotee and wrote that the perce- neige’s fragrance reminded her of orange blossom.
Some say the scent is similar to honey. To me, they smell of snowdrops and all I can say is that there is a very slight sweetness.
To discover this I had to kneel in the mud because I can never bring myself to pick them.
This is not because in some parts of the country the snowdrop is known as ‘Death’s flower’ and believed to bring misfortune if you have it in your home. It is because I like to see them where they live, in multitudes, in the bare woods.
The art historian Sister Wendy Beckett also prefers them ‘gleaming and singing’ in her garden.
In my love of snowdrops, I am aware that I am following fashion. Currently, they are considered terribly chic. There are connoisseurs of snowdrops. As many as 20 varieties exist, and galanthophiles — snowdrop collectors — are willing to pay hundreds for rarer ones.
Over the weekend, 250 buyers from Britain, the Continent and the U.S. met in Myddelton House in Hertfordshire where the ‘Great Snowdrop Rush’ sale was being held. They paid up to £100 for a single bulb. (The record is £725 for a bulb grown in Scotland which sold on eBay in 2012.)
I don’t share this passion for these unusual specimens, though in the wood near me I find the occasional exotic one. A few are exceptionally tall, about 25cm (10in) high, with long slim leaves, catwalk models towering above the ordinary mortals; others are doubles, with petals that look like frilly knickers.
MY FAVOURITE, by far, is the common snowdrop. It has three outer petals which, at first, are closed tight to protect pollen from rain and sleet, and to hold on to what warmth it can. It resembles a drop of snow because, unlike many flowers, the snowdrop has a white calyx — the bud’s outer case.
There’s a reason for that whiteness: to make the flower more conspicuous to insects in dim light.
As the temperature rises slightly, the bud opens to reveal a sort of scalloped underskirt with splashes of a clear, bright green that’s ultraviolet and attracts insects.
On warmer winter days, bees sometimes land on the outer segments, grasp the inner ones and bring a shower of dusty pollen on their heads. Most of the time, though, the snowdrop propagates itself by bulbs.
No one is certain how or when the snowdrop arrived in Britain. Some historians argue it was introduced by monks in the Middle Ages as it is often found growing in great colonies on ancient monastic sites.
But there was no artistic representation of a snowdrop until the 16th century and the name doesn’t appear to have been used before the late 17th century. It was not recorded as growing wild here until the 18th century.
Now though, it is now firmly planted in our affections. However long and black these winter nights may be, the snowdrop’s arrival is a guarantee of change.
At a time when we most need a sign that life is always moving on, this tiny flower penetrates the gloom, glimmering white in the shadows under the beech trees: a promise of spring feeling its way and striking out.