Thank god for snowdrops.

I don’t remember when I saw snowdrops for the first time but it must have been during the winter of 1992-1993 when I was working as a volunteer at Georgetown’s historic Tudor Place.  It was there, during my first garden volunteer experience, that I fell in love with so many plants, and snowdrops (Galanthus), a member of the Amaryllis family, are among those crowded at the top of the list.

When I moved to Connecticut, I discovered to my complete delight, that I had several pockets of snowdrops in my new garden.  The biggest group was in my untamed side garden where a small but dense tumult of white flowers began blooming vigorously just after the snows receded.  The winter of ’93-94 was, as I recall, distinguished by 17 snowstorms and bitter cold.  It was the first time I’d experienced  perpetual ice encrusted  snow lasting on the ground for months and, as a Seattelite, I found myself craving green and anything that bloomed.  It was a winter that made me understand the importance of a winter garden, and the appearance of the snowdrops that kept me sane.

I cautiously moved a few of the clusters  (Galanthus are easily transplanted but best moved in spring, after they’ve finished blooming – just don’t let them dry out) to places in the garden where I knew I’d see them more frequently, and left the seed heads to ripen on the rest, hoping they’d continued to naturalize, which they did.  The little sprouts look like thick grass blades and come up with the leaves of the mature bulbs.  Every fall, I’d order more galanthus (typically a G. nivalis or G. elswesii cultivar), and each spring I’d divide the larger clumps and move them to other parts of the garden.  Each spring, as I eagerly awaited the first snowdrops to open, I wished I’d planted twice as many.

I also tried to include them in every garden I designed.  When I was working with John Brookes, the international garden designer and a friend, on an estate in New York, we ordered thousands of bulbs, galanthus among them.  He urged us to pot the snowdrops up in the fall so we could plant them in the spring as we found places that were crying out for a clear winter white bloom.  In the UK, he tells me, you can buy them at nurseries in the springtime, just about to bloom, just for this purpose. 

Snowdrops, which are deer and squirrel resistant, emerge as early as late December or early January and, depending on the weather, can last months.  In the early 2000’s, when we had a few warm winters back to back, and were convinced we’d be growing palm trees in zone 5 gardens by the end of the decade (clearly a mistake, as this has been one of the coldest winters on record here in our Nation’s Capitol), my snowdrops bloomed from Christmas until March.  By this time I’d planted them along side hellebores, white forsythia (Abeliophyllum distichum), daffodils, and scilla, and through liriope and other grasses, which I’d cut back in early spring before the snowdrops appeared.  They were gorgeous in their ever-abundant colonies along the fence, in perennial gardens, under the beech tree, and anywhere else I could tuck them and where I would see them from the house or the driveway.   I also planted them on top of daffodil bulbs, figuring that as long as I was going to dig a hole, it seemed sensible to pack it with as much as I could and I did, to great effect.

I miss my old snowdrops so Sunday, as I was walking through Georgetown, I was delighted to see a tiny clump growing by someone’s front door, beside residual variegated vinca and dried leaves from a Japanese maple.  Note to self:  Order plenty of snowdrops for the new garden next fall.  I think I will plant them in planters so I can put them exactly where I want them after they’ve bloomed.