Snowflakes For Summer

Confused with snowdrops, denied as being a British native, Leucojum have had a chequered history. Mark Griffiths celebrates this misunderstood, but brilliant garden flower

ON a day in May, sometime in the 1770s or 1780s, the botanist William Curtis was exploring the Thames-side between Greenwich and Woolwich when he encountered a plant he’d never expected to find. Although bulbous, it was flourishing amid reeds and marsh marigolds, ‘just above high water mark’, he recalled. Standing in sheaf-like clumps, its leaves resembled a daffodil’s in shape, but were deep glossy green.

Over them, hanging in clusters from 2ft-tall stalks, the flowers hovered: dazzling white bells with an emerald spot at each petal tip and yolk-yellow anthers that were revealed by the breeze’s ruffling.

Before long, he witnessed these blooms again—this time, joined in a dance of breathtaking brightness and delicacy along the muddy shore of the Isle of Dogs.

This was Leucojum aestivum, a species that, in England, had only ever been recorded as a garden plant, one that first became popular with Elizabethan horticulturists, who imported the bulbs from its native countries in Continental Europe. And yet the specimens that Curtis had found were, he contended, ‘undoubtedly wild’ and growing ‘where no garden, in all probability, could ever have existed’.

He commented: ‘For my own part, I am perfectly satisfied of its being a native of our island, and have no doubt but it will be found in many other parts of it.’ He announced these discoveries in Flora Londinensis, his botanical survey of the capital and its environs. At the same time, he proposed a new English sobriquet for this unlikely Eastender.