Here we are. At the start of our visiting season I’m not in the best of moods but I stop reading the news to take a walk round the garden and I can’t help smiling when I find the snowdrop given by a dear, gardening friend last year. Perky, eye catching, Galanthus “Trumps” could do with a new name, I think, but what a beauty.
We are not knowledgeable collectors but we do have a cheerily spreading mix of snowdrops at Pond Cottage. Come and see, there are lots of frilly doubles. And plenty of the more simply elegant singles, ‘the original woodlander’ as the Royal Horticultural Society calls the not-native but widely naturalised Galanthus nivalis. There are also pleasing clumps of recognisable broader leaved Galanthus woronowii. But there could be other varieties that I don’t know about. Singles and doubles hybridise promiscuously – and you have to look very closely to spot the often tiny differences between the green sploshes on flowers of intermingling clumps.
To be honest, apart from a little intervention under the conifers, we have mostly left the snowdrops to it. We could have been doing a lot more to help them spread by lifting and dividing and replanting the bulbs ‘in the green’ when the flowering is finished. And yet, they’re doing a pretty good job themselves. This year we have been surprised to see the ground light up in new places, reaching further under the trees and along the stream banks. How did that happen?
Snowdrops have their wily ways
A little random online searching reveals intriguing information about the naturalising and hybridising of snowdrops. There are natural forces at work. Hungry bumblebee queens pollinating the fragrant flowers, foraging ants feeding their larvae on a protein-rich appendage on the seed pods. The ants transport the pods back to their nests but leave the seeds unharmed and ready to grow … snowdrops have their wily ways! We’re less fond of another frequent force, the floods of brown water that inundate our wetlands after each storm, but there is compensation: high water detaches bulbils and carries them downstream to settle where they will.
Human hands dabble in pollen too. There’s the fascinating story of the Greatorex Doubles, [which I found thanks to the specialist Galanthus nursery] the legacy of a very patient Englishman credited with being the ‘founding father of snowdrop breeders’ [see Susan Rushton’s entertainingly detailed account]
It seems Heyrick Greatorex earned medals for his WW1 service in France, and led a Home Guard detachment guarding Acle bridge in Norfolk during WW2. In peacetime Norfolk of the 1940s and 50s he turned his hand to hybridising, producing a highly popular range of doubles ( using pollen, it says here, from Nivalis flore pleno doubles to cross with the single Galanthus plicatus). From his garden Snowdrop Acre, with an old railway carriage for a conservatory, Greatorex achieved remarkable results. There’s much more to the man and his doubles which he often named after Shakespearean characters (there’s a ‘Cordelia’ and ‘Desdemona’ of course). They are celebrated in an astonishing number of garden blogs and specialist nurseries, but I’m stopping my search in Ballyroberts gardens before I become altogether lost in snowdrop wonderland.
Galanthus “Trumps” – what’s in a name?
“Trumps”. It’s not about the US president, for once. Trump is an old English word with several meanings, some of them rude. The name probably wouldn’t have stirred a second thought in 1999 when this hybrid was spotted by snowdrop specialist Matt Bishop during a visit to artist plantsman John Morley in his garden North Green in Suffolk. (Though, rather unnervingly, according to BuzzFeed 1999 was the year when Donald Trump first flirted with the idea of running for president. )
“Trumps” is just one of around 300 snowdrops grown by John Morley in his North Green garden . Whatever the name, the bulb is clearly a winner and has been exciting nurseries, collectors and garden writers for more than 20 years. The RHS description is the least lyrical I’ve seen so far: “A bulbous perennial, to 15cm tall, with relatively broad, grey-green foliage and solitary, nodding, white flowers, with a green splash at the tips of the outer segments, and a green hoofprint on the inner ones, in mid-winter.”
Rare Plants nursery invites flights of fancy which might appeal to my grandchildren: “A beautiful, early-flowering snowdrop … The shape reminds me of that of an alien spaceship from early video games.”
And the price? Rare Plants charges £15 per bulb. You might pay £20 or more elsewhere. I owe my generous, green fingered friend a treat! Meanwhile we’re looking forward to a vigorous spreading of the bulbous perennial.
The Pond Garden is now open to visitors supporting the work of Children’s Hospices Across Scotland through Scotland’s Gardens Scheme. We’d love to see you. Just get in touch to fix a visit.
(Snowdrops were probably introduced to British gardens from Europe in the 16th century but not found in the wild until the 18th says Woodland Trust).
Leave a Reply