John & Maria's Garden Pages

The snowdrop season has already begun

The Garden House, at Buckland Monachorum, Devon, UK, houses an ever increasing collection of snowdrop species and cultivars.  I'm a volunteer there, helping to document the 10 acre garden as the seasons come and go, and one of the later autumn to early spring joys is getting down to (usually wet) ground level to photograph the 350+ collection of species and cultivars. Getting down is fairly easy - getting up again can, at 73, be more problematic.  But the results are worthwhile.

A fair number of cultivars of the glaucous foliaged Galanthus elwesii flower in November and December.  I don't claim to be a snowdrop specialist but it's always enjoyable to see vigorous clumps of, for example, 'Huggett's Round' in full flower among the last of the autumn display'

Equally vigorous is G. elwesii var. monostictus 'Smaragdsplitter', with green flashes on the outer petals.  Under the careful attention of head gardener Nick Hayward and his garden team and our resident snowdrop expert Pat Eaton this is now flourishing in mutiple sites in the garden

G. reginae-olgae is anothe autumn flowering species, never better than opening wide to bask in the low angled sun.

 As well as the species we grow a number of early flowering hybrids, including this rather lovely, yellow marked G. 'Turkish Delight'

These are but a fraction of the collection.  Most will be on display between mid January and March 2024 when The Garden House snowdrop festival takes place