Eden Wild Goose Nature
Nature notes from the Focus Magazine February 2021
 
EWGN 2021 02a Focus pix
Spring flowers of hope

Do you like to play that old game of word association, where I say a word and then you say the first thing that comes to your mind? Well, what comes to mind if I say ‘snowdrop’?
Midwinter? Cold? Hope? White?
 
To me, and probably many of us, they are flowers of hope, reminding us in the bleakest part of the year that it is all going to be all right, Spring will come again… and in fact it’s already on the move. There is something so encouraging about that, sending a few shivers down my spine, and reminding me of my favourite childhood book, ‘The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’.
 
I feel very fortunate here, as in the woodland area next to the church yard at Holme Eden there is a beautiful carpet of snowdrops that cheerfully poke through the fallen leaves and shake their apparently delicate heads in defiance of the continuing winter weather. It’s very hard to put a foot down without squashing a few, so we made a little pathway where there were fewest, so you can walk through with as little damage as possible and enjoy them at close quarters.
 
They seem somehow so British, but like many of our cherished fauna and flora, it’s believed that they were introduced to our islands. For snowdrops this probably happened sometime in the sixteenth century, as no records of them have been found before then, and all the folklore that surrounds them comes from later times. According to one ‘galanthophile’ (snowdrop enthusiast- and yes, it is a thing) whether they are native or introduced remains an area of controversy… who would have thought? Anyway, there are sixteen species and around seven hundred named varieties now, as once they all met and got to know each other sometime back in Elizabethan times, they interbred … hybridised?... quite happily and spread widely across the country. Many grand gardens run snowdrop events, so we can meet the relatives of our most common species, Galanthus Nivalis (or snowy milk flower), that grows so well in our more homely gardens.
 
Snowdrops are sometimes known as the ‘Candlemas flower’ as their peak flowering time in early February coincides with Candlemas Day on February 2nd, half way between the shortest day and the Spring equinox, and celebrated in past times by processions of young girls dressed in white dresses symbolising purity. Hence the flowers were also known as ‘white ladies’ or the ‘fair maids of February’.
 
Now, with our warmer wetter winters, they are beginning to flower earlier and earlier. This year, I even spotted a few in our garden trying to bloom before Christmas, which somehow didn’t feel right.
 
Still, they are widespread, they are pretty, and they gladden our hearts at the coldest time of the year, so wherever they came from and whenever, I think we can in this case put controversy behind us, simply enjoy them and, with their encouragement, look forward to Spring.
 
Philippa Skinner