There’s a weight to plants that come from people, an extra few grammes of solidity and heft that must be an artefact of the stories to which they act as anchors. You can’t see the bundle of memories, sensations and emotions that accompany each of these gifts, but they’re there all the same, attached I’m convinced by some golden filament of light that stretches into an adjacent dimension, that place where all the meaning with which we imbue plants and pets, everyday objects and even other people, can be found. I brought quite a weighty selection of snowdrops back from Ma’s house in the Cotswolds this weekend. We’re in the process of selling the property, and the prospective buyers have plans to remove the roadside wall so that they can park their cars on the front garden (which makes perfect sense – it’s a very long front garden). But the bed behind the wall will be sacrificed, and the plants will need a new home. Ma found this bed a tricky one to plant and, perhaps as a consequence of her perennial dissatisfaction with its performance, I’m not hugely attached to much that’s there, but the snowdrops have always stood out for their cheery, winter’s greeting when so much else about is mush, or barely waking. They’re chunky doubles – nothing fancy, just your basic Flore Pleno, two rows of petals making for fat heads and a bell-like crinoline outline instead of the more slender, waspy form of the single-flowered kinds. For some reason they’re more substantial than the delicate double already growing here in my Kent soil, though I think we can put that down to the form’s notorious variability (like many double forms, it can’t set seed, but that froufrou genetic trait gets into the mix with the local snowdrop population through its pollen).
I dug out three, fat clumps, managing to snag a few bits of wall bellflower which may or may not have found their way from my childhood home in north London. These I wrapped in bundles of newspaper and plonked into a paper bag, and that has been sitting outside the back door in the rain since I got back a couple of days ago, waiting for me to escape from my desk for long enough to get them in the ground. Planted ‘in the green’, just like they tell you to with snowdrops. A tiny salvage operation, bringing a little bit of my late folks’ garden back home. Surprisingly heavy, for such small flowers.
I so understand this 'heaviness'. My mum dug snowdrops from her childhood garden in Exeter when my grandmother was too old to stay there, and popped them into her own. The first spring I had a garden she dug them from her soil and brought them, trowel in hand, to plant in mine. She is no longer with us to walk among them but they have spread all around. She loved snowdrops so much she left money in her will for the planting of them in her local churchyard, and on the common. If I move, as many as possible will definitely be coming with me!! Hope yours are happy in their new home.
I sort of love snowdrops (and am planning to divide and spread them around a bit here) but they also come with attached melancholy for me. During a particularly bad episode of depression a few years ago I found myself planting them as I sobbed beneath the oak tree. Perhaps my salty tears were just what they needed for they flourished there and naturalised beautifully. Pleasure and pain are never very far apart are they but I hope your new arrivals will bring more of the first for you. Xx