Friday

52. Snowdrops

I've been pretty obsessed with snowdrops this year. I've always loved them and it was a thrill last January to realise that the garden of our new home was carpeted with them.

I suppose it's not surprising as they are tough little flowers for all their seeming delicacy. They just keep flowering through snow, ice or gales as a symbol of hope over adversity.

According to legend, snowdrops became the symbol of hope when Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden. When Eve was about to give up hope that the cold winters would never end, an angel appeared. She transformed some of the snowflakes into snowdrop flowers, proving that the winters do eventually give way to the spring.


The name snowdrop does not mean 'drop' of snow, it means drop as in eardrop - the old word for earring.

I think, at the end of February, they should all be gone, but our garden is still full of them. Every morning I go out and walk around the house and look at them all. As I drive to the Moor with the beagles, I see thousands more in the woodland and around the houses en route. 

The joy is that even when they are gone, they will be replaced by daffodils and then by bluebells. Spring is coming.

Yesterday I took a new road home from the Moor just to see what was down there. I've seen it many—to a hamlet called Ash—but never taken that route. It was gloriously beautiful. At one point I drove through a lake of snowdrops around one of the most beautiful houses I've ever seen. It stopped me dead in my tracks.

Maybe we'll live there one day? Who knows. There is always hope.

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