Snowdrop Season

Tiny Ranks Of Curious Forest Dwellers

For about a week now, I’ve broken with my usual habit of coming to the garden via the back drive, and have instead come in through the Lions Gate. This drive brings me through a wooded ravine with a sharp drop down to the River Tyne on the left and a steep incline on the right, both of which are completely  - almost improbably - smothered by snowdrops in February. The display is arresting at any time of day, but in the twilight hours they emit an almost eerie luminescence. They appear like tiny ranks of curious forest dwellers, turning the pale almonds of their faces to the road to see who is passing (or maybe I just have an overactive imagination). 

I feel very fortunate, ecstatic even, to witness a natural phenomenon on my drive to work every morning but despite this I’m no obsessive galanthophile. You won’t find me crawling around in the undergrowth trying to distinguish one from another, so my assumption is that these are almost all progeny of Galanthus nivalis cultivars that have been spreading and hybridising over several hundred years. G. nivalis is often considered to be native to the UK but really it’s natural distribution is damp woodlands and meadows from Spain to as far east as Ukraine, arriving on these shores some time in the 16th century. This population of bulbs may be at least as old as the garden and house, and it’s intriguing to think who they may have seen passing on by in that time. 

Whilst the bulk of the snowdrops are in the wider estate, we do have some clumps in the garden that we are gingerly working around as we step into borders to cut back and tidy. Whilst I do like to leave as much herbaceous material standing as possible I find late winter is such a busy time that it doesn’t make sense to save all of the cutting back until then, so I do it all winter as time allows. This year I’ve experimented with using an electric hedge cutter to chop down stems into small segments, leaving these in the border to act as a mulch. This saves the big job of hauling it all away to the compost and means it will hopefully suppress weed growth as the weather warms. Let’s see.

Speaking of warming weather, we’ll begin the first sowings of summer annuals in the later part of this month. We’ll start slowly with tough plants like snapdragons, foxgloves, and Cerinthe, most of which will go into the new cut flower beds we’ll create over the next few weeks. We’ll keep on lifting, dividing, and splitting plants in the garden, and begin taking hardwood cuttings of willow and Buddleja to bulk up stocks of new plants. As much as I’m always looking forward to spring I usually feel like it comes around before I’ve had a chance to get everything done, so on that note I will sign off until March and wish you all a happy snowdrop season! 

Kate