Surely a sign that Spring is just around the corner?

The gardening blogosphere is positively awash with snowdrops right now, so it seems a shame not to join in….

We’d actually forgotten these guys were in the garden;  we remember seeing them when we first moved here, but then left that area to fend for itself, and the self sown holly thicket that we’ve just cleared grew and grew, and engulfed them.  So it was a real joy to realise that they’re still with us.   They must have had a pretty hard time competing with a dense canopy of holly, so they stand as testament to the resilience of the species.

We make no pretence that we’re any sort of galanthophile, so have absolutely no idea what variety they are – it seems unlikely that whoever planted them would have been any sort of connoiseur either, so we presume they’re the common or garden Galanthus nivalis.

And jolly charming, and very welcome they are too.   With precious little else happening in the garden at the moment, it’s reassuring that mother nature is out there following a schedule, even if most of the country’s gardeners have rewritten theirs pending better weather.

Today this field, tomorrow......

The real snowdrop surprise came when we peered over the rudimentary fence that separates our garden from the adjacent field, and saw that our little colony seems to have made a bid for freedom, and established an outpost next door.   These little guys really are surviving against the odds – the field is under regular cultivation growing maize, wheat and potatoes in rotation, and is ploughed and sprayed repeatedly.   This little colony is surviving in barely a yard of field margin, where the fence angle prevents the tractors getting right up to the edge.

So while we might be charmed by their delicate beauty, we can’t afford to let our guard down – snowdrops clearly have their own agenda, including world colonisation if the opportunity arises.

Their only problem seems to be that given a rate of progress which needs to be measured in feet per decade, it could take some time!

This entry was posted on Monday, March 1st, 2010 at 12:00 and is filed under Plants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.