Were snowdrops first brought to Britain by the nuns and monks of medieval abbeys? Phil Gates explores the mysterious origins of spring’s first fair maids
Phil Gates is a naturalist who writes for the The Guardian’s Country Diary. He lives in County Durham and for many years was the senior lecturer in botany at Durham University.
A bright February morning in St John’s Chapel, Weardale, and most of the snow on Chapel Fell has melted away. At first glance, it seems that it still lies in a thick carpet among the gravestones down here in the churchyard, but these are snowdrops: hundreds of dainty white flowers, dancing like ballerinas on their slender stalks. Even the faintest zephyr of wind sends a shiver through their ranks.
Longed-for spring has arrived and the reawakening snowdrops gladden the heart and lift the spirits. It’s a scene repeated in churchyards, ruined monasteries and abbeys the length and breadth of Britain, so familiar that it might seem that these are native wildflowers, residents here when Christianity took root in our islands. This may not be entirely true. But if snowdrops are not a native plant, how did they come to flourish in so many scattered sites across our islands?
MYSTERIOUS ORIGINS
Snowdrops have a natural range that extends across many European temperate countries and into the Near East. The ancient Greek philosopher Theophrastus described bees visiting the blooms on Mount Hymettus, and they were known to St Francis of Assisi in 12th-century Umbria.
In Britain, though, there is no record of snowdrops before 1597, when John Gerard noted in his Herball that they were grown in London gardens. He called them the “timely flouring bulbous violet”, a peculiar name for a white flower, but then ‘violet’ was a common term for a scented bloom. He mentions that they were cultivated for the sweetness of their fragrance; a soft, honey-like aroma when brought indoors, even detectable outdoors on warm spring days where they grow in profusion.
The word snowdrop first appears in print here in 1633 but that, too, might have foreign origins. The Victorian cleric and naturalist Rev Hilderic Friend, writing in 1886 in his Flowers and Flower Lore, advanced the romantic notion that ‘snowdrop’ might be a corruption of the German schneetropfen, meaning ‘pearl earrings’, alluding to the way those snow-white, teardrop-shaped buds dangle like elegant jewellery on their slender stalks.
Snowdrops were first recorded in the wild in the UK in 1778.
