I don’t know when I fell in love with snowdrops, they were always part of my life. I grew up on a farm where masses of snowdrops were a welcome sight every January.

They grew in clumps and were naturalised all over the garden. They just thrived on neglect.

When I married and made my home in Limerick, I was lucky to inherit a patch of the less common double snowdrop, with it’s multiple petals that form the flower.

The old snowdrops grew in an orchard and one day I remember looking around and saying, ‘wouldn’t it be lovely if the entire orchard was covered in snowdrops’. And that’s what I’ve been attempting to do ever since.

Small beginnings

I began with about four or five clumps borrowed from home. If you’ve ever dug up a mature clump of snowdrops, you could find up to 100 bulbs all crowded on top of each other. Dividing them out does them a favour.

By the time we are into December, the first pointed spears of the snowdrop army will have broken through the ground.

Flowering will start shortly afterwards and will continue into the end of February or even early March.

The best time to propagate snowdrops is directly after flowering when they are ‘in the green’.

It’s easy to see where spaces need to be filled and they get a chance to bed in before their leaves wither and die.

At one stage, I had a craze for collecting rare snowdrops, but that addiction wasn’t for me.

I love the optimism of snowdrops. They pop up at the toughest time of the year as if to comfort us and promise that ‘everything is going to be all right’.