Don’t you love it when Spring comes early? I for one have been blooming in the warm Spring sunshine just lately. And the biggest lift of the heart comes from early Spring flowers, only a week ago snowdrops were poking their heads through the snow and now they are already competing with the brighter blooms of crocuses and daffodils. Yay! So what is it about snowdrops that means that every tourism website has lists of snowdrops openings in February?
Medieval medicine
We haven’t always had snowdrops, they aren’t native to Britain but come originally from around the Black Sea. They have an old association with Candlemas, a Christian festival celebrating the Purification of the Virgin Mary 40 days after the birth of Christ. It falls on 2 February, so if you are admiring the drifts of snowdrops somewhere monastic, Fountains Abbey, say, you may be looking at an echo of rather exotic early ‘Candlemas Bells’ planted by monks as a symbol of purity. I’m sure the brothers had a smile when Spring came around each year but they also may have valued the little bulbs’ medicinal qualities. There is some evidence that rubbing snowdrops on the forehead was once believed to relieve headaches.
Snowdrops’ first mention in literature comes in John Gerard’s Herbal of 1597, though he seems not to have known about their medicinal potential and they were only given a name in the 1633 reissue. The Romantics could hardly have been expected to overlook the delicate virginal blooms of snowdrops - Wordsworth was versifying about them in 1819 and they were Tennyson’s ‘February Fair-maids’ but it has taken until the last 50 years to rediscover the medicinal possibilities of galantamine that might help us fight the modern scourge of Alzheimer’s Disease.
Harbinger of Death
If you’re strolling through the graveyard, you’ll often see snowdrops. This might be a throwback to the Candlemas connection or just because, as the first flowers of Spring, they are a great sign of renewal and new life – good Christian themes – or because they are poisonous and, like yew trees, the stone walls of church graveyards kept grazing stock away from them. As a result of seeing them in profusion near grave stones, Victorians associated snowdrops with death, which may have tarnished their popularity a bit and some people are still superstitious about bringing the little flowers into the house.
21st century snowdrop mania
In the 21st century, interest in snowdrops has suddenly become something of a mania. Have a look, this is not the only blog around expounding their virtues. They are on the CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna) list of endangered species that cannot travel across borders, mostly because wild colonies in Turkey were trashed in a lucrative trade in the ‘80s.
I have a strong suspicion that historic houses and gardens have had no small part to play in this surging popularity. So many gardens have chosen to open for the first time in the year in snowdrop season that advertising, media coverage and the expanding number of hybrid varieties has helped fuel the boom. The National Gardens Scheme hosts a Snowdrop Festival and there's now a famous Snowdrop Festival in Scotland. Add in a drop of Spring sunshine and snowdrop strolling is a new sport enjoyed by increasing numbers of galantophiles (snowdrop lovers, in case this word just hasn't slipped into your everyday vocabulary). Heritage gardens are turning us all into galantophiles.
If you want to join their ranks, head North, the first snowdrops are a bit later than in the South but they last far longer and will be with us well into March, whereas in more southerly gardens daffodils are already stealing all the attention. Some places are more famous for snowdrops than anything else, Hodsock Priory in Nottinghamshire for example. Some are sharing the development of hybrids, the National Collection is held by Cambo Gardens in Fife, where Catherine Erskine sells snowdrops 'in the green' by mail order - now is the time to plant them.
But perhaps it is just that we have all been cooped up by bad weather and, in the first sunshine of Spring, the dancing heads of snowdrops give us an excuse for a little expedition into the great outdoors and, let's face it, the paths of historic gardens are a lot less muddy than stumbling around in the woods. It's nice to know that just as the monks may have played their part in spreading snowdrops around Europe in the past, you are now part of a boom in 'galantaphilia' in the 21st century.
Above: 1 Hodsock Priory; 2 Cambo Gardens 3 Howick Hall Gardens