Snowdrops and Ambivalence – GardenRant

Snowdrops and Ambivalence

We were both full of cough and were quite unwell. I have not recovered, and I find myself quite unable to write anything new. So I dipped into The Bad Tempered Gardener to offer you a piece on those plants which gardeners obsess about at this time of year: snowdrops.

Snowdrops

Ok, I may hate gardening, but the slightest glow of winter sunshine draws me irresistibly outside.

I think it’s basically an excuse to be outside. I look for some snowdrops. I pick some, and then I glance approvingly at them in a vase for a few days. Then I scowl at them for a few days as they go brown, until at last in an uncharacteristically housewifely frame of mind, I throw them out.

Snowdrops with sarcococca

I follow a similar routine with Sarcococca, but this has the added advantage of being the best pluckable scent in the garden, one which really can do that fabled and elusive thing, ‘scent a room.’

But I do not crawl about on my hands and knees in the winter mud gawping at endless variations on the form of the snowdrop flower.

Or variations on the length of its stalk or a touch of yellow where the green should be. I have never understood this obsession, but then I don’t dwell much on the subtle beauty of any flower (bad person). I like to mass them, use them, sculpt with them; make pictures in the landscape which capture the imagination. I think there are probably two kinds of lookers, besides the supermodel kind. Those who have patience and appetite for detail and those like me who love the broader effect. I’m the same with books – I want to understand what someone is saying, dive in for the meaning rather than dwell on the beauty of the expression. I rush along, impatient with self-conscious language that merely demands that I notice and admire it. The same with plants.

I love a mass!

The garden world is full of the relentless plant detail, filling the yawning garden pages. The need for endless soothing and repetitive articles conjuring up a Never Never Land of spotless plants sidelines people like me. Maybe there are no people like me. No plants like mine?

Here comes a well chewed hellebore to delight us all….

The absence of dramatic display means I even deceive myself in December and begin to believe that I could shed the garden and all its work and works and take to a library to indulge the study of history. Come January and the sun I’m off out there again. What for? I hardly know. A compulsion to see what’s happening? to have another look, to kick over a molehill and see if I can discover where the b… rabbit is coming from?

Yep, snowdrops.

In other words, I can be deeply ambivalent about that lot outside in winter.

However, I do feel glad to see the isolated but still reappearing snowdrops of one particular and special kind. I got them when I interviewed a snowdrop fan for an article on her snowdrop/aconite/tiny winter flowering full/ speciality garden for an article we never sold. I fell for the idea of a few specials, and here I am, welcoming one back again, even though they’re hardly thriving and spreading.

Why? I feel a little flattered maybe, that they haven’t totally shunned me. Intrigued to see what’s special about them, because I really have no idea, can’t remember a thing about them, especially their names. I was once reproached by a garden club which I spoke to for my failure to remember the names of some (very ordinary) plants in my own garden. It seems sympathy for the disabled has not spread to garden club land, or the members there are still blissfully unaware of the crippling effects of middle age on the names bit of our brains.

Unknown snowdrop

I won’t be doing anything with those unusual snowdrops. They are only just hanging on, can’t upset them by picking any stems for the rotting in the house routine. I will watch them come out, examine them at least once and leave them be. And I greet them in this desultory manner every year that they deign to reappear. Mutual tolerance. If they don’t ask anything of me, I won’t ask anything of them. That’s it, then. They’re snowdrops…….

(But should you be in the UK and would love a snowdrop treat, the Wye Valley Sculpture Garden is for you – masses of named and happy snowdrops. And tea and cake, of course!)