CAROLYN'S SHADE GARDENS

To access our current snowdrop catalogue, click here.

This fall, I received my copy of Some More Snowdrops by Anne C. Repnow (Davidia Press 2024) and  immediately read it cover-to-cover.  As with her previous book Some Snowdrops: A Photographic Ramble (Davidia Press 2020), I was captivated by the excellent photographs and comprehensive descriptions.  I want to share this first-rate book with you in time for you to purchase it for use as a reference during the upcoming snowdrop season.

Another reason why I am excited about this book is that Anne will be joining the ranks of such snowdrop luminaries as Matt Bishop and Alan Street and giving the annual Bank-to-Bend Lecture at Winterthur in Delaware on March 8, 2025.  I hope many of you will plan to attend!  You will be able to buy her first book, which is currently out-of-print, at the lecture too. 

All the snowdrops featured in this post except ‘York Minster’ above will be available in our 2025 Snowdrop Catalogue coming out in December.

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 also 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.
.The book starts with some beautiful landscape photos of snowdrops, this one of a magnificent stand of award-winning ‘Trumps’ taken at the Garden House in Devon, England.

Anne Repnow gardens near Heidelberg, Germany.  She started her career in scientific publishing but during that time took courses in horticulture and landscape design.  Fourteen years ago she followed her love of gardening into a new career as a garden designer.  Along the way she managed to accumulate over 500 snowdrop cultivars in her own garden.  Anne organizes the German snowdrop event Snowdrop Days in Luisenpark.  There is no mention of photography in her bio but the photographs speak for themselves.

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‘Dryad Gold Sovereign’ is the best of the Dryad Gold Group of snowdrops, featuring flowers twice the size of ‘Primrose Warburg’.

The heart of the book is descriptive profiles of 103 snowdrop cultivars illustrated with more than 310 well-chosen photographs.  Each snowdrop gets its own page with a full paragraph of description, including an explanation of its markings, an account of its discovery, and a focus on why it is in the book.  For ‘Dryad Gold Sovereign’ above, Repnow calls it “wonderfully prolific” and well-proportioned.  She also provides a chart with an approximation of bloom time, a ranking of vigor, and a relative price.

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‘Jonathan’ has beautiful, large, globular flowers with a face on the inner segments.  It is a lot like ‘Grumpy’ but much more vigorous.

For this post, I have scanned four pages from Repnow’s book profiling snowdrops that will appear in our 2025 Snowdrop Catalogue: ‘Trumps’, ‘Dryad Gold Sovereign’, ‘Jonathan’, and ‘Mrs. Macnamara’, which brings me to another reason I love this book.  Repnow does not just focus on snowdrops that are new and relatively unavailable to American gardeners, although there lots of those to drool over, but includes a large number snowdrops that are available in the US.  Many cultivars in Repnow’s two books are in our 2025 catalogue, while many more have been offered previously by Carolyn’s Shade Gardens.  This is not a book for dreamers, but for gardeners who want to grow snowdrops.

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‘Mrs. Macnamara’ is another favorite available in our 2025 catalogue.  One of the earliest to flower, usually by January 1 here, it combines all the fine characteristics of a classic snowdrop, which earned it a rare Royal Horticultural Society Award of Garden Merit.

If you would like to purchase Anne Repnow’s new book, which I highly recommend, you can order it directly from the author by clicking here.  Her first book is currently out-of-print, but she will be selling a limited number of copies at her Bank-to-Bend Lecture on March 8, 2025 at Winterthur in Delaware.

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Carolyn

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