"Pay attention to the world." -- Susan Sontag
 

Ambitious Spring Snowflakes (Leucojum vernum) (3 of 3)

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From “Snowflakes and Snowdrops: Leucojum” in The Little Bulbs: A Tale of Two Gardens by Elizabeth Lawrence:

“L. vernum is called St. Agnes’ flower in honor of the patron saint of young virgins. The modest, chaste, and solitary bells are wonderfully fragrant, but the fragrance is not of violets. It is of vanilla and of something else, something that eludes analysis….

“The buds swell when they are ready to open, but the lime-green tips of the petals remain tightly twisted into a point until they suddenly flare apart. The scapes continue to stretch up after the flowers open, and so, in a single clump, the nodding bells are hung on stems of varying heights, from one to six or more inches. The thin, polished leaves come with the flowers but develop more slowly. They are curved in a way that repeats the hooked flower pedicel in a delightful and characteristic rhythm.”

From “Harbingers of Spring” in When You Seek Me: Poems by Paula Marie Breiter:

Forerunners humble
Shy teardrops, tiny, demure
Snowbells welcome spring

From “Harbingers of Spring” in When You Seek Me: Poems by Paula Marie Breiter:

Invite me to stoop low
And examine
The poignant remnant of
fragile winter beauty
Bowing humbly graceful
before the dawn
A cluster of snowbells
Nestled amid brown bare
surroundings

Hello!

This is the third of three posts with photographs of Spring Snowflakes, Leucojum vernum, that I took at Oakland Cemetery in the middle of February. The first post is Ambitious Spring Snowflakes (Leucojum vernum) (1 of 3) and the second post is Ambitious Spring Snowflakes (Leucojum vernum) (2 of 3).

Spring Snowflakes (sometimes called Snowbells, as in the two poems above) happily occupy two locations at Oakland. The first location is just inside the main entrance to the property, where they are among the earliest flowering plants visitors will discover as they enter in February or March. At this location, the Snowflakes thrive at the base of some shrubs and smaller trees, where they’ll catch morning sun then get to bask in shade for the rest of the day. The population here has expanded over the years I’ve been photographing them, from a handful of sparsely arranged clumps to a crowd of plants filling spaces around the adjacent tree trunks, memorial stones, and architectural elements. As the season proceeds, the Snowflake buds will disappear but their leaves remain until well into the summer — creating a rich green and grassy palette that complements the flowering plants that bloom after them and around them: azaleas, irises, hydrangeas, lilies, daylilies, and occasional marigolds, among others, providing a broad range of textures and colors that greet returning visitors and introduce the variety of plants they’ll encounter further into the property.

The second location isn’t far from the first, but its composition is quite different. Imagine a large rectangle, where the right side of the rectangle is adjacent to the main entrance walkway I just described. The first section of the rectangle you encounter extends along a sidewalk — a sidewalk somewhat hidden by shrubs on both sides — and into the property at your left. If you keep walking, you’ll encounter stretches of Spring Snowflakes just inside the rectangle — a field that’s mostly open except for those plants landscapers have placed along its borders, with its center left empty and used as a staging area for events, or, at other times, as a picnic area by visitors. The Snowflakes appear here in separate clusters of three or four plants each, with spaces between them, extending across a span of about twenty feet. Like the Snowflakes in the first location, the number of plants has grown substantially over the years, and in the spring your eye is drawn to the many white bell-shaped flowers bobbing in the slightest breeze.

This field only gets filtered sun at its edges, because it’s covered by a leaf canopy from some of Oakland’s oldest oaks and maples, whose age is evident from the enormous size of their trunks. Flowering plants appear along the other borders of the field throughout March and April: daffodils first, followed by tulips, followed by bluebells and azaleas surrounding the trunks of its trees. The combination of a tree canopy, border plants only, and wide open center section gives the whole space a distinctive form, one that feels like you’ve entered a separate outdoor room as you walk from one side to the other — a physical experience similar to walking through a forest then suddenly encountering a clearing, where the visual characteristics of the transition are almost jarring in their differences.

The sense that you’ve entered a separate room that feels like a natural cathedral is not just compelling visually. Though the tree canopy, border plants, and open space are an obvious visual attraction, the auditory experience is the real showstopper. The entire property is surrounded by Oakland’s original brick walls (which are six to eight feet tall), which dampen sound from the city streets around it. When you first enter the property, though, that’s not immediately apparent, because the entrance is still close to the streets and there are always people milling about. But by the time you pass to this canopied section housing our Spring Snowflakes, all of that sound is significantly reduced as if someone turned the volume down, and it remains reduced as you proceed from there deeper into the property. It’s almost as if the landscape designers created not only a visual transition, but an auditory one where you move from noises of the surrounding streets until you are bathed in silence and completely detached from the outside world’s noise. This soundlessness repeats itself no matter how often you visit the property, sort of like you enter an airlock or don sound-cancelling headphones while walking from the entrance to the canopied area. And the ground in this area is frequently refreshed with new pine straw, which, intentionally or not, dampens sound further: even your feet barely make a noise as you traverse the area.

This is of course not something that can be captured with photographs (though I’m still gonna try!), but is still integral to the design of a garden cemetery like Oakland. Visual and memorial characteristics are combined with simulations of the natural world where we can experience a quiet departure from the sensory racket of urban life outside its walls.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

Ambitious Spring Snowflakes (Leucojum vernum) (2 of 3)

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From “Snowflakes and Snowdrops: Leucojum” in The Little Bulbs: A Tale of Two Gardens by Elizabeth Lawrence:

“Nearly everyone in the South calls a snowflake a snowdrop. No matter how often Southerners are told that Leucojum aestivum, found in every dooryard, is a snowflake, they go on calling it snowdrop…. For no good reason the snowdrops (Galanthus) are very uncommon in my part of the country — not that they will not grow, but because local gardeners think that in having leucojums they already have snowdrops….

“The generic name of the snowflake, leucojum, is from the Greek. It means white violet, and was given to the plant because of the fragrance of the flowers. I never knew that they were fragrant until I read it in a book. The perfume is so subtle that you must warm the flowers in your hand before you become aware of it….

“If you trust in names there is a snowflake for each season — winter, summer, autumn, spring — but, like so many ideas that are charming in the abstract, the naming does not work out so well. The winter snowflake, Leucojum hyemale, blooms in spring; the summer snowflake, L. aestivum, often blooms in winter in these parts; and the autumn snowflake, L. autumnale, blooms in summer.

“The spring snowflake, L. vernum, does bloom at that season — a month later than the Galanthus, according to the books, but at the same time according to my garden record. The tips of the buds, folded between the leaves, appear above ground early in January, but they wait until the end of February to bloom. I keep hoping that a mild season will bring them out much sooner….

“Although this species has been common in British gardens since it was brought to England from central Europe at the end of the sixteenth century, it is very rare in America. In fifteen years of ordering L. vernumwhenever I saw the name in a catalogue, the bulbs invariably proved to be L. aestivumwhen they arrived….“

From “Cultivation of Leucojum” in Snowdrops and Snowflakes: A Study of the Genera Galanthus and Leucojum by F. C. Stern:

“The species of Leucojum which are most often seen in gardens are L. vernum and L. aestivum and their varieties. They all grow easily in good garden soil and are all very attractive plants. In the garden none of them appears to have any preference for any particular soils. They grow in well-drained positions in loam with or without lime and are perfectly hardy…. L. vernum is particularly useful in the garden as it flowers in February and March. It does well planted either on the north side or in a sunny place….”

Hello!

This is the second of three posts with photographs of Spring Snowflakes, Leucojum vernum, that I took at Oakland Cemetery in the middle of February. The first post is Ambitious Spring Snowflakes (Leucojum vernum) (1 of 3).

In that previous post, I described some of the differences between the Spring Snowflake and its companion species in the Leucojum genus, the Summer Snowflake (Leucojum aestivum), as well as how often plants in the Galanthus genus — Snowdrops — were thought to be the same plant, because they (allegedly!) looked like they were. So just imagine my excitement when I found this seventeenth-century botanical drawing by Hans Simon Holtzbecker (from the sites plantillustrations.org and SMK.OPEN) that shows how different these three plants really are. By placing all three in the same illustration and rendering their botanical characteristics with precision, Holtzbecker makes it easy to distinguish among them. The top plant in the drawing is the Summer Snowflake, the bottom right plant is the Spring Snowflake now made famous by my posts, and the bottom left plant is a Snowdrop.

The Snowdrop shows the distinctive helicopter blade or propeller-shaped flower petals, as I previously described. The Spring and Summer Snowflakes have flowers of similar appearance to each other, but the Summer version tends to produce a handful of flowers on each stem, whereas the Spring Snowflake typically produces only two or three. With more flowers clustered together in staggered positions, the Summer Snowflake is more likely to display flowers whose center structures are exposed to many kinds of midyear pollinators. The Spring Snowflake, on the other hand, keeps them turned toward the ground, accessible to intrepid flying insects emerging from winter and attracted to the flower’s scents, but protected from the potentially damaging elements of very early spring severe weather.

You might think, then, that we’ve dispensed with any confusion over similar-looking plants. Yet we learn through the excerpt from The Little Bulbs: A Tale of Two Gardens above that Elizabeth Lawrence, writing in 1957, considered the possibility that there was “a snowflake for each season” — so four, not just one for spring and one for summer. In this writing, the Autumn Snowflake (Leucojum autumnale) and the Winter Snowflake (Leucojum hyemale) bloom in those two additional seasons (with some overlap) to give us year-round Snowflakes.

I’ve never seen either of those Snowflakes, but if I had, I would have subsequently learned that the two plants with those names — originally Leucojum autumnale and Leucojum hyemale — have since been determined through genetic analysis to belong to a separate plant genus entirely (Acis), and are now known as Acis autumnalis and Acis trichophylla, respectively. Click here and here if you’d like to see images of these two Acis family members, where their visual similarities to both Snowdrops and our legit-Snowflakes are apparent — that visual similarity likely accounting for how all four plants got lumped into the same genus historically. When Lawrence later published Beautiful at All Seasons: Southern Gardening and Beyond in 2007, she no longer included the Autumn and Winter Snowflakes, but still gave attention to the Spring and Summer Snowflakes — noting the remains of species confusion that continue to this day, especially since the Spring Snowflake is still the more rarely encountered garden gem.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

Ambitious Spring Snowflakes (Leucojum vernum) (1 of 3)

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From “The Mediterranean and the Near East” in The Plant Hunters by Alice M. Coats:

“Spain was always a country apart, isolated physically by the barrier of the Pyrenees and politically by the Moorish occupation, which lingered till the end of the fifteenth century. The last country in Europe to be botanically explored, it was the first to be exploited by a professional horticultural collector, at a time when gardens were still in a transitional stage, part physic-garden, part botanic-garden, and only incidentally assemblages of ornamental plants.

“The collector in question was a Dutchman, Guillaume Boel (sometimes called Dr Boel), ‘in his time a very curious and cunning searcher of simples, who worked for Coys and Clusius as well as for John Parkinson, by whom he was ‘often before and hereinafter remembred’.

“The references to Boel in Parkinson’s first book (1629) are all complimentary, but in his second (1640) there are complaints that while travelling at Parkinson’s expense Boel had sent seeds to a rival (William Coys), who had forestalled the author with descriptions of the new plants — ‘while I beate the bush, another catcheth and cateth the bird.’ Nevertheless, Parkinson received from Boel some 200 packets of seeds, besides bulbs and ‘divers other rare plants dried and laid betweer papers and the collector could hardly be blamed if they did not all succeed….’

“As this implies, many of Boel’s introductions were annuals, and not all were new; but the plants he sent to England included Scilla peruviana, Leucojum vernum, Armeria latifolia, Convolvulus tricolor, and possibly Linaria cymbalaria and Nigella hispanica.”

From Seeing Flowers: Discover the Hidden Life of Flowers by Teri Dunn Chace:

“Aptly named spring snowflake, Leucojum vernum, serves up a generous early season helping of tiny, chubby white bells with green accents. Sometimes placed in the Amaryllis family, sometimes placed with the lilies, it is especially valued for its ability to prosper in soggy ground.”

Hello!

This is the first of three posts with photographs of a flowering plant at Oakland Cemetery that always marks the transition from winter to spring in my photography projects. Its most recognized common name — Spring Snowflake — fits that timeline perfectly. It’s also sometimes referred to as Snowbell, because of the flower color and shape; or as St. Agnes Flower, a name connecting the plant to the January 21 Feast of Saint Agnes celebrated by several religious denominations. Its scientific name is Leucojum vernum, and it’s one of only two species of plants in the Leucojum genus, the other being the nearly identical Leucojum aestivum, or Summer Snowflake.

I first photographed and wrote about these plants in 2021 when I found them intermixed with Snowdrops, a plant in the Galanthus genus (see Snowdrops and Snowflakes, Daffodils and Tulip Leaves). Galanthus has since disappeared from Oakland and was probably crowded out by the highly ambitious Snowflakes, whose ground coverage has expanded dramatically each year I’ve photographed them. That 2021 post was one of the first ones where I learned — with the help of PlantNet — to distinguish between species of plants that are frequently confused until one takes a close look at the differences in their appearance. Galanthus flowers, notably, have petals that are more separate (rather than overlapping) and both longer and thinner, described, by me back then, like this: “Snowdrop flowers have petals that look like helicopter blades with only one flower on a stem; snowflakes look like tiny bells and will often produce multiple flowers, clustered near each other, at the tip of each stem.”

Five years later, that description still holds up reasonably well; but you can look at that post if you’d like to see photos that show how different they are. And if you’re really, really interested in learning about Leucojum versus Galanthus, take a look at the 1956 book Snowdrops and Snowflakes: A Study of the Genera Galanthus and Leucojum by F. C. Stern. The author covers nearly every botanical, historical, and gardening difference between the two kinds of plants going back to the 1500s, and includes posthumously published drawings and writings by E. A. Bowles — the celebrated botanist I first wrote about after stopping to photograph a Corkscrew Hazel (Corylus avellana ‘Contorta’) in 2023 (see Winter Shapes: Corkscrew Hazel), subsequently exploring that plant’s history and learning about how Bowles accumulated unusual, often overlooked or underappreciated plants in a section of his gardens that he called his “lunatic asylum.”

According to the book The Little Bulbs: A Tale of Two Gardens by Elizabeth Lawrence, Leucojum vernum — despite being vaguely characterized as having naturalized to parts of Georgia and Florida — is actually not common in southeastern gardens, so it’s noteworthy to find them at Oakland at all. But having observed and photographed these plants for six years now, and having photographed them as early as mid-February fully in bloom, I think it’s accurate to identify them as Spring Snowflakes because their Summer Snowflake relative would be unlikely to bloom before April, especially after atypically cold winters like ours of 2026. And it’s also true that the Summer Snowflake tends to produce more flowers per stem than the Spring Snowflake, which, as is evident from my photos, rarely produces more than three flowers (with an occasional exception) on each stem, and most consistently produces just three.

Here, actually, we have one of the exceptions — a plant that has produced four flowers, one of which was upturned to reveal the flower’s inner architecture. That rarity was of course what caught my eye when I was taking the photos, as it’s the only one in this entire series to reverse the plants’ normal bell-shaped nodding structure and give us a peek inside. Over my six years of photographing these plants and accumulating about 150 Snowflake photos, I only encountered upturned flowers one other time, in 2024. Like the flowers from 2024, this one appears to have become trapped between the pedicels of the other flowers, which is probably the reason it got stuck downside up.

I took this series of photos on a very blustery day, the morning after a series of thunderstorms had passed through the area — late enough in the morning that the plants had mostly breeze-dried but their bells bounced un-photogenically in the wind. One’s patience gets tested in conditions like that (especially with such tiny subjects), but I took dozens of photos from numerous distances, focal lengths, and shutter speeds to end up with enough that were decently focused and sufficient for three blog posts.

While working on the photos in Lightroom, I couldn’t help but notice the contrasts between the plants’ dark green leaves and stems, their dark surroundings, and the white blossoms — which produced a nice glow even on that cloudy day. Unlike most white flowers I photograph, Snowflake blooms are very close to pure white, featuring a complete lack of color pigment that is often present in flowers like, for example, white irises. Having noticed that, it tickled me to read that E. A. Bowles described the plant similarly in his 1914 book My Garden in Spring, where he noted that Spring Snowflakes produced flowers that are “hard to beat for pure white” — something captured 112 years later in photographs, by me!

Thanks for reading and taking a look!