If you drive behind me this time of the year, be prepared to make some rather sudden stops! Just like buses and trucks that brake for RR tracks, I brake for snowdrops.  No, no—not the white fluffy stuff that floats down gently from the sky.  What I’m talking about here are those sweet things of early spring that captivate my heart and set me swooning—those tiny dangling, white flowers of Galanthus sp. that wrestle their way through the ever warming soil and shine in my garden sometimes as early as the  middle of February.  


Photo: Betty Earl

Sure, tulips and daffodils are the big daddies of spring, but me, I go for the little guys. However, if truth be told, galanthophilia first struck me without warning just last year. My friend, Randy, has a woodland garden to die for…full of rare and wondrous plants—and the mature trees which stand guard over his treasures provide the perfect woodland habitat for his vast collections of shade lovers.  And one of the plants he collects is snowdrops.  

So, there I was one day last spring, while meandering along his mulched pathways we came upon several fine examples of these distinctly unusual snowdrops. One look at those virginal, white-tipped spears emerging from the stark earth, like sirens on a rock—and I was hooked. There was the much treasured, ‘Lady Elphinstone’, a double flowering nivalis, with buttery yellow inner petals,  ‘Merlin’ which is popular because of its all-green inner petals, ‘Viridapicis’, larger than the variety with a white margin on the all green inner petals and green spots on the top of the other petals, and ‘Scissors’, the latter named because the green spots on the inner petals supposedly look like tailor’s shears—but, as much as I hate to admit it, my untrained eyes just couldn’t pick out those blades.

Snowdrops are a promiscuous bunch; plant them close to each other—and left to their own devices, they can produce some rather surprising offspring. There is always the feeling that I may just discover something special in that next patch, for among the 200 or so listed cultivars, few have been deliberately bred. Most come about by serendipity, discovered by some sharp-eyed galanthophile down on his/her knees on the cold earth examining a clump of snowdrops on a blustery winter’s day. See that shivering form of humanity groveling in the dirt? Yep, that’s me…hoping for that little bit of serendipity! 

—Betty Earl