Over 80 gardens around the country are opening for the National Gardens Scheme Snowdrop Festival this month, celebrating the beauty of our best-loved early spring flower.
Snowdrop Festival
Some of the gardens are a galanthophile’s paradise with hundreds of different varieties, while others mix snowdrops with other early spring beauties like hellebores, reticulate irises and winter aconites.
At Devonshire Mill in Yorkshire drifts of the double-flowered snowdrop, Galanthus flore pleno, surround a Grade II listed water mill in a two-acre garden. Higher Cherubeer in Devon offers a National Collection of cyclamen as well as over 300 snowdrop varieties; while The Down House in Hampshire comes alive with snowdrops, aconites and crocus, plus winter borders full of coloured dogwood and willow stems and white birches.
Snowdrop Gardens
It’s not too late to boost the snowdrop display in your own garden: you’ll find ready-potted bulbs of both single and double snowdrop varieties on sale at our garden centre here in Athlone ready to plant out in your garden for an instant display. Or come back after snowdrop season is over and pick up some snowdrops ‘in the green’ for carpets of demure little white bells from early next spring.
The NGS Snowdrop Festival runs throughout this month. For more details visit www.ngs.org.uk.
