Snow magic

At Dryad Nursery near York, botanical artist Anne Wright has been breeding some highly collectable snowdrops, writes Mary Keen 

- Mary Keen 

THE rarification of snowdrops continues. Unusual snowdrops with hints of gold or splashes of green make very high prices, but big business has not yet cottoned onto producing these collectors' treasures. It's a cottage industry and Anne Wright in York, sole owner and breeder of Dryad Nursery, has been quietly getting on with creating some of the most covetable flowers around. A botanical artist with a degree in biology, she was brought up in a family of gardeners and found that by selling plants she could earn a useful income without leaving home.

Miniature narcissus are her first love she still has 14,000 little daffodils that have to be repotted every year-but she began crossing snowdrops in 2006, with the aim of developing yellow hybrids with more vigour than any bulbs available at the time. Yellow colouring does occur in the wild, pollinated by bees rather than by a methodical plants person. I'm not waiting for the bees,' Mrs Wright says, but even hand pollination involves a long wait. From seed sowing to bulb selling takes about nine years, but, by crossing two different snowdrop species, nivalis and plicatus, she knew that her plants would have more vigour. Her first cross was with "Wendy's Gold' and sandersii, from which she had some useful and exciting results.

Ordinary gardeners plant snowdrops in the ground and reckon to increase them by division, but chipping the bulbs is a faster and more reliable way for the expert. Chipping a snowdrop bulb is done in the early summer when bulbs are dormant, usually in the first weeks of June. Amateur gardeners can try it, but should know that this meticulous work must be done in sterile conditions.