We like to think of them as the first sign of Spring, but there are years when they start to flower in November. Not a sign of Spring then, but a promise that there will be one.
They send out reconnaissance missions, individual plants spear up through the soil and risk flowering, testing the temperature and the storms, willing to weather whatever snows and frosts may yet come, to get a general feeling for the lay of the land.
Later, when they arrive en masse, they arrive as suddenly and silently as overnight snow.
Abundant in churchyards and cemeteries, associated with Candlemass and purity, we don’t know who brought them here or why. I think: for their simple beauty, surely, before their heads bowed down under all the weight of symbolism we heap upon them. I believe they were brought by soldiers and monks and simple travellers from the east, for the simplest of reasons: as reminders of home.
Placed in graves and gardens, with a more temperate clime, they flourished and spread. Aparently not noticed in the records until the 1600s there are those who say they came in with the Romans, or the Normans. We do not know. If we do not know when they were first here, as opposed to being first talked about as being here, how can we know when they arrived - or if they were here, in the hidden places, even long before that?
Naturalised is the word that gets used, which means taken root and spread and not objected to. They are too demure, too polite, for anyone to object and if they have crowded out some other, actually native, species it was too long ago and we have forgotten…the way we have forgotten that most of us were once invaders, generations back, the way we have forgotten that there were peoples here, before ours came.
They have been the poster-child of flowers, had their ‘crazy fan club’ moments, fashionable for a season – grown for picking and sending to the cities for a few days in a vase.
They are still experimented upon, cross-bred, hybridised, because we always want new varieties. Why are we never satisfied with simplicity? Why are we always seeking – and mostly failing – to improve on nature?
I know the latest silly-sum for a single bulb is £1,850. For a single bulb, that may or may not flower where you plant it, like a fortune for a painting you will never hang on your wall. And if it does, who will come to view, who will know it for its subtle difference to its commoner cousins out there – along the river, in the woods, through the cemetery? Who will know exactly why this one is any more beautiful than all of those out there to be enjoyed, for free.
I have one small cluster in my garden this year. But at least she’s free. She came of her own accord and cost me nothing. Perhaps she will be fecund, perhaps even now she is plotting. We call them demure these February Fair Maids, but they are anything but. Like those other “handmaids” they are rebellious, they will escape from (or into) gardens, free from the places we’d have them breed, courageous in finding their own ways in the world and out of the darkness.
Rightful symbols of rebirth.
My clump may spread, or she may decide this is not the place for her kind. Either way is ok.
There are 500 named varieties and countless cross-cultivars…and I’m sure that galanthophiles care about their differences in petal shape, and shades of green, and petal spots that some might think of as impurities…but for most of us, or at least for me, the simple, common snowdrop, the Galanthus nivalis, the milk flower of the snow, that somehow (I don’t really know how) travelled from the Caucasus mountains to the lowlands of Norfolk and graces our late Winter, she is the greater joy.
To come upon a drift of unexpected snowdrops lifts the heart. The carpet of them is a spectacle. More even than the showy daffodils and bluebells that will follow in their footsteps, they call to us to go down to their level…to actually fall upon our knees…to look at them as individuals, each one too delicate for this time of storms, too frail, to be as strong and pioneering as they are.
I can't be the only one who does not want to look down on them, but to go down and look up at them.
The sacred feminine embodied by Galanthus nivalis isn’t purity or demurity: it is strength, it is resilience, it is community. The single clump of snowdrops does not remain that way for long. She creates or draws into herself more and more of her kind. And they do not crowd each other – they allow each other space.
This year I walked a snowdrop pilgrimage. We walked up a forbidden lane into the edgeland of the woods, where unwanted bulbs unearthed from a planting scheme had been 'placed for safekeeping' or perhaps abandoned to their fate. They had founded their own place there. A colony. A community. A holding.
From there we went into the churchyard, and found bowed heads praying at the graves of fallen soldiers. They congregated in the lower part of the yard, in the less-tended space, away from the godliness of flint walls and spires, at home beneath the winter brambles, keeping company with the forgotten ones whose poppies were faded and disintegrating, whose stone urns held no more formal flowers, only rainwater and ivy leaves.
Thence into the formal Winter Garden, where we found them in small isolated bunches, among the hellebores and the black-mulched earth, where they were no doubt told to keep their place, and were equally no doubt plotting their escape. One or two had already made it to the lawn.
It has become a February ritual, this paying homage to the snowdrop, but this year it struck me that they look like pilgrims themselves, the way they gather about in groups, like tired travellers huddled together with those they know, among so many strangers, and uncertain where to go next. They group around a mossy stump, as if it were a pulpit. They string out along a pathway, as if waiting for a procession. They gossip. They pray.
They light a dark February woodland with white lanterns, like a fallen constellation of stars among the trees, a scattering of new year among the still drying-out, rotting down, old-year leaves.
This much I know about snowdrops: my heart soars when I find the first one of the year, and then I start to hunt them out, to spend time with them, to crouch down in the cold wet earth with them, but it is only now that I realise, I have never wanted to pluck one and bring it home and place it in a vase.
