Snowdrops

To those who love and collect snowdrops, little distinctions make these bulbs worth the hunt:The tiny green mark on "Robin Hood" is a faint X, while that of "S. Arnott" looks more like an up-side-down heart. "Mrs. McNamare has a small slim V.
"You start looking at them a little closer, and you get stuck on these tiny, minute differences, and it all starts making sense," says Michael Loos, a collector in Ovid, N. Y. "And the biggest excitement about snowdrops is that they start blooming now."
Something happens in the last days of winter, as the little white flowers pop through snow, signaling spring before the litany of tulips and daffodils steal the show. The snowdrop-so small, you have to bend and look-holds its own in the garden because of its lively appearance when everything else looks dead. Lately, it has earned something of a cult following among hard-core gardeners and plant collectors in the United States, following its popularity in England where tour buses trek out to snowdrop fields in February. Hundreds of new varieties have been discovered in recent years, thanks to its growing legion of fans, who are known in the gardening world as galanthophiles, named after the snowdrop's Latin name, Galanthus.
Elise du Pont, heir to the WaWa chain of convenience stores and wife of former Delaware Gov. Pierre S. du Pont IV, says she scavenges a country dump near her home in Rockland, Del. where snowdrop bulbs sometimes inadvertently get tossed out with other garden scraps and sprout through the soil. "There, you find the best Galanthus," says Ms. du Pont, an avid gardener and competitor in flower shows. These days, she is coveting a pink variety she has heard about. "I don't know where to find it, but I'm going to find out."
Who would have thought that the humble snowdrop would have such a following. Check Brent and Becky's bulbs for more varieties of snowdrops.