It’s snowdrop festival time so join your nearest galanthophiles and enjoy some of the season’s most exquisitely beautiful flowers up close on one of the many Snowdrop Days happening around the country.
Among the most famous are the fabulous collection at Colesbourne Park in Gloucestershire, begun in Victorian times and still evolving today: there are now an astonishing 250 different varieties to see. Hodsock Priory in Nottinghamshire boasts a half-mile walk through woodland carpeted with snowdrops; while Lacock Abbey in Wiltshire, the walled garden at Cambo Gardens in Fife, and in London, the four-acre oasis that is the Chelsea Physic Garden are all showing off their snowdrops from this month. You’ll find even more snowdrops at the National Garden Scheme’s first Snowdrop Festival, with more than 100 private gardens across England and Wales opening their gates to visitors.
You can have a snowdrop festival in your back garden too: just fill your borders with a selection of the dozens of exquisitely marked little bulbs available. You’ll find many varieties ready-potted in our garden centre here in Henley on Thames; ‘Flore Pleno’ is a lovely double, ‘E.A. Bowles’ has purest white, almost globular flowers; Galanthus elwesii will grow in drier soils; and ‘S. Arnott’ is particularly tall and elegant.