Westcroft Snowdrop Garden

 Lyn Miles, who gardens at Westcroft garden near Salisbury did a fantastic job of advertising her garden to  Lawn Gardening Club and Wroughton and District Gardeners association on successive evenings. Lyn is a true Galanthophile, and although she has at least 500 different varieties of snowdrops, is always on the lookout for more. Lyn sells snowdrops in the green, and if you visit her website via the link above, she will send you a list of those available, depending on how they have 'bulked up' over the last year.

There were a few interesting facts about snowdrops, firstly in order to get good growth and big clumps of snowdrops, it's a good idea to give them tomato feed and try not to disturb them until the clumps get quite large when you should split them making sure to plant them quickly into the ground so there is minimal drying out.

This was a return visit to Westcroft, I first visited 3 years ago and was keen to return with friends Sandie and Rob. We chose a beautifully sunny day at the end of January as you can see from the photos taken that day:

Above there were quite a few glorious benches made out of fence posts and metal ornamental snowdrops

Here's another similar bench:

and some of my favourite snowdrops:

This one above is G Sentinel a beautiful snowdrop.

Above this is G.Gill Hadland

and this one is G Roulade

And this one is G. Rodmarton Regulus a giant of a snowdrop and one I'd like to buy for my garden.

When looking at snowdrops for sale, Lyn noticed a bee actually inside a snowdrop flower:

If you look at Lyn's website, you can see that she's open quite a lot until 13th March for snowdrops and then quite a few other times throughout the year for the NGS.

What I haven't mentioned is that last year I visited a wonderful garden, open today and next Thursday for looking at snowdrops, and bought a snowdrop bred by Roger Norman of Ivy Croft at Ivington Green. I wrote about it here, but didn't mention The snowdrop bred by Roger which I hoped would appear in the front garden again this year because I paid £65 for it. I need not have worried, it has had 2 flowers and been looking fantastic for at least 4 weeks now:

I'll report again next year and hope to have 3 flowers.

Meanwhile happy snowdrop hunting.