CAROLYN'S SHADE GARDENS

To access our current snowdrop catalogue, click here.

We posted our 2025 Snowdrop Catalogue on Sunday to a very enthusiastic response from our wonderful snowdrop customers all over the country.  Our limited supply of the rare and special snowdrops included in our catalogue always sell out in the first few hours.  However, in this post, I want to sing the praises of the more ‘ordinary’ (if you can say that about a Galanthus) snowdrops that should be the backbone of any winter garden while showing you the beautiful winter landscape at the Cambridge University Botanic Garden.

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The bright white of the award-winning snowdrop ‘Magnet’ is a welcome addition to all parts of a winter garden.

What snowdrops am I talking about?  The easiest way to find them in our catalogue is by looking at the prices.  Snowdrops that multiply easily and rapidly in almost any conditions are less expensive because we have more of them available.  Snowdrops like ‘S. Arnott’, the so-called desert island snowdrop, which galanthophiles would choose if they could only have one.  Or ‘Straffan’, brought back to England by a soldier from the Crimean War.  Or ‘Mrs. Macnamara’, a very early bloomer selected by Dylan Thomas’s mother-in-law.  Or ‘Trumps’, the most vigorous and beautiful pagoda-shaped (inverse poculiform) snowdrop.

Nursery News:  Carolyn’s Shade Gardens is a retail nursery located in Bryn Mawr, PA, specializing in showy, colorful, and unusual plants for shade.  The only plants that we ship are snowdrops within the US.  For catalogues and announcements of local events, please send your full name, mailing address, and cell number to carolyn@carolynsshadegardens.com and indicate whether you are interested in snowdrops.  Click here to get to the home page of our website for catalogues and information about our nursery and to subscribe to our blog.

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Number one rated ‘S. Arnott’ with hellebores and a winter-blooming iris.

Another way to find them is to look for the designation RHS AGM at the end of the plant descriptions in our catalogue.  This means the snowdrop has received a prestigious Award of Garden Merit from the Royal Horticultural Society in England.  The Society gives AGMs to help “gardeners choose plants that have been tried and tested by experts [and] …  are likely to perform and are excellent for ordinary use.”  Snowdrop AGMs are awarded after extensive trials and judging by snowdrop experts.

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‘Magnet’ was used throughout Cambridge Botanic Garden, here massed by the pond.

Of the over 2,500 named snowdrops, only 28 have been awarded the RHS AGM.  In addition to the four briefly described above (‘S. Arnott’, ‘Straffan’, Mrs. Macnamara’, and ‘Trumps’), we also sell ‘Magnet’ (in the photo above), ‘Augustus’ with beautiful quilted flowers and striped leaves, ‘Barnes’ a vigorous fall-bloomer, very large-flowered ‘Bertram Anderson’, and the common snowdrop Galanthus nivalis, which has multiplied throughout our garden.  To see photos and detailed descriptions of all of them, click here.

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Snowdrops offer a bright contrast to plants with purple, red, and gold winter colors.

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The yellow flowers of winter aconite, Eranthis hyemalis, weave in among silver grasses, bergenia, and heather.  We also sell it in our catalogue.

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Yellow winter aconite brings out the gold in brightly-stemmed dogwood.

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A more subtle but elegant combination, blue-stem willow, Salix irrorata, with snowdrops.

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And then there is this eye-popping pairing of snowdrops with bergenia, heather, and bright red-stemmed dogwood backed by golden conifers.

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Snowdrops look lovely here and in my garden in February with Narcissus ‘Rijnveld’s Early Sensation‘—yes, it does bloom that early!

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The ways to use snowdrops in masses in your winter landscape are not limited by space considerations as they go dormant after they bloom and can be planted around other plants or in the backs of your beds.

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I could write a whole post on how much we loved visiting Cambridge.  You can walk everywhere, and it has excellent museums, restaurants, scenery, walking tours, and gardens.  The colleges within the university are gorgeous and the evensong music of their choirs is heavenly.   

We stayed at the Duke House right in downtown Cambridge, whose very friendly and welcoming owner provided lovely accommodations, excellent breakfasts, and parking on site so we could abandon our car while we were there.  In addition to the Cambridge Botanic Garden, when we were in the Cambridge area, we also visited Benington Lordship Gardens, Anglesey Abbey, and Wandlebury Ring, all of which were amazing.

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Blogs are a lot more fun for everyone, especially the writer, when readers leave comments.  If you are reading this post in the WordPress email (white background), just reply to the email to comment.  If you are reading the post on my blog (black background, recommended for better viewing), scroll down to the end of the page to the box where it says “Leave a Reply” and start typing—-it’s easy!

Carolyn

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