Discovering the Beauty of Snowdrops at Ballyrobert Gardens

Ballyrobert Gardens, galanthus, gardening, Monty Don, snowdrop season, snowdrops

Yesterday, my sister in law and I spent a lovely afternoon together, discovering the beauty of snowdrops at Ballyrobert Gardens. We weren’t the only ones there. The car park was full of people who like ourselves had booked for a guided tour of the snowdrops, a much loved and welcome little flower at this time of year.

Ballyrobert Gardens

Ballyrobert Gardens is a family run garden in County Antrim, Northern Ireland, which is open to visitors. It is also an RHS Partner Garden. From the garden they trial, propagate, grow and sell plants – both online and on site. You can learn more about them here.

A growing interest in snowdrops

During the past decade or so, interest in snowdrops (Galanthus) has grown enormously (just check out Instagram for example). Ballyrobert has responded to that interest by expanding their collection of varieties and extending the general snowdrop display areas. There are about 19 snowdrop species and thousands of varieties. Ballyrobert has approximately 200 varieties in their garden, including some Irish ones. Personally, I don’t get hung up too much on the varieties. The common snowdrop Galanthus nivalis is good enough for me !

As well as being shown the different varieties as we walked around the garden, our tour guide gave us useful tips on where to plant snowdrops and how to propagate by divison. He also talked about plants to grow alongside snowdrops – for example, cyclamen coum, bergenia, hellebore and witch hazel). The tour took approximately one hour and, with the tour complete, we returned to a small tea room. There we enjoyed hot cups of tea, tray bakes and a chat before heading back out into the garden again. Despite the February drizzle, we couldn’t resist another wander to admire the snowdrops. The haze of white across the woodland floor is such a pretty sight to behold and it doesn’t last for long.

A word from Monty

I found this rather lovely quote the other day from Monty Don in his book My Garden World.

‘The fragile beauty of their nodding white bells is imbued with a sense that all is fundamentally well with the world and all we really have to do is to aspire to be as good as a snowdrop’

Wishing you all a lovely Sunday

Paula x