In the low winter sunshine of Jo Hynes’s Devon garden, early bumblebees alight on snowdrops, crocuses and cyclamen. The temperature is still low, the days still short, but Hynes has nurtured a great carpet of early flowers, mingled together and stretched out beneath trees and shrubs, many of the shrubs winter-flowering too. She chose this style of planting partly to mimic the way they grow in the wild. “In the Caucasus you see these wonderful meadows of cyclamen and snowdrops, all mixed up together, great sheets of them,” she says.
While the plants may be native to Turkey (which has the widest range of snowdrops), western Russia and the Mediterranean, Hynes’s garden, known as Higher Cherubeer, is very British. “We get a lot of rain here,” she says, “and the soil is acidic clay, so it stays particularly moist. And we are at the top of a hill – 150 metres above sea level in between Dartmoor and Exmoor.”
You might think that Mediterranean plants would struggle here, but in fact, there is a great range of snowdrops to suit all sorts of conditions. The snowdrops that are commonly grown in the UK – Galanthus plicatus, G elwesii and G nivalis – all like moisture. In Higher Cherubeer, though, they are helped by being grown under trees and shrubs. “Cyclamen and snowdrops flower in the late winter and early spring, and in doing so they make the most of the time when there is no canopy to the trees,” Hynes says. “Then, when the trees are in growth, the conditions encourage them to go into dormancy, just as the heat does in the Mediterranean summer.”
