The galanthophile's galanthophile

Joe Sharman started breeding snowdrops before anyone else and, after 10 years of meticulous work, he created the most expensive snowdrop ever sold. Today, he continues his quest for ever more curious and enchanting variations, finds John Grimshaw

- John Grimshaw

SOMEWHERE in rural Cambridgeshire, Joe Sharman is breeding snowdrops. To most people, this statement may seem odd, but, to the core of snowdrop-lovers known as galanthophiles, it’s important information.

Mr Sharman grew up in Cambridgeshire in the 1960s and 1970s, when children were expected to entertain themselves and could set off for a day’s exploration, giving no one the slightest qualm: he recalls climbing up the middle of a hollow oak to emerge, sweeplike, at the top. Encouraged by his grandmother and aunt, he started gardening within the family plot aged four and, when the Sharmans moved to a larger garden, he got round the limitations of his allotted space by keeping chickens in mobile runs and growing vegetables on the bare patches they created.

Gardening all but took over his life in his teens—he sold his first plants aged 18—and formal training and ‘proper jobs’ in the horticultural industry followed. His own interests, however, always remained with the rare and curious—real plantsman’s plants—in which he was mentored by several great gardeners of the day. It was in 1985 that his mother drew his attention to a clump of snowdrops with yellow markings (instead of the usual green) growing at the Cambridgeshire hill fort site of Wandlebury Ring. They proved to be an entirely new variant of Galanthus plicatus and Mr Sharman’s article about them in The Garden, naming the clone ‘Wendy’s Gold’, drew the attention of the then very small number of serious galanthophiles.