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!
