The essence of a British spring and yet a non-native, superficially so delicate and yet with the power to puncture its way through a frozen winter soil, the snowdrop is an enigma. Beyond its simple exterior, the ever-familiar slender narrow twin leaves and ice white bell-shaped flower, there is a complex answer. An answer to surviving temperatures falling below -10ᵒC, an answer to reproducing when few pollinators have yet emerged, and an answer to some of our most pernicious diseases: Polio, multiple sclerosis and perhaps even Alzheimer’s. Every early spring, the opening petals of a snowdrop mark the return of a small miracle.

The snowdrop so familiar to us is Galanthus nivalis ‘milk flower of the snow’. Long thought to be a native wildflower, it is now believed to have been brought into the UK by the 16th Century: Shakespeare’s time. It took perhaps 150 years before it could be found growing on riverbanks and roadsides, and carpeting woodland floors in the fantastic displays we so well recognize today. Ecologically, it was already an interesting puzzle. Why did it spread so well here, out of its native range and away from its native pollinators? Why did it become naturalized, seemingly ‘at one’ with the native flora, and not an invasive species?

As Shakespeare was making history with his critically acclaimed plays, far away a smaller change was stirring. Gradually, snowdrops were colonising the UK.

The answers to the ecological puzzles lie in its biology. The snowdrop has two routes to reproduction: sexual with pollen transfer via the flowers, and asexual through clonal propagation via bulbs, much like daffodils. This dual ability gives it freedom: when the snowdrop arrived in the UK it left behind its associated winter-hardy pollinators. But this did not matter: reproduction via bulbs freed it from dependency on pollinators and seed production. Interestingly, this also helped it to spread quickly along rivers; winter floods tearing down river banks packed with bulbs to deposit them downstream. And the snowdrop was such an unusual arrival, growing and flowering in mid-winter, that it offered little competition for the natives.

But for snowdrops to flower in the winter cold, they must first make it through the soil surface. For this, their leaves have specially hardened tips to puncture the frost layer and break out into the open. Here, it is even colder than below ground and the snowdrop must cope with frequent drops below zero. This is made possible with anti-freeze proteins (glycoproteins) crammed in the plant tissue. These proteins prevent the formation and growth of ice crystals so that the tissue never freezes and instead thrives in conditions few other plants can. Today, we produce our antifreeze synthetically but in World War One snowdrops were harvested and processed to protect army tank engines against the bitter cold.

The snowdrop’s ability to survive freezing temperatures led to it being used in army tank engine antifreeze during World War One

A more familiar use of snowdrops is likely their function in medicine. In mid-20th century Eastern Europe, peasant farmers used crushed bulbs to relieve headaches and snowdrop tea was used to fight paralysis by Polio. These medicinal abilities arise from a chemical called galanthamine which acts against declines in sensitivity of ‘receiver’ neurones to nervous impulses from ‘sender’ neurones and thus treats against neuronal death. Galanthamine is now commercially and synthetically produced and recent research has shown that it has potential in slowing the onset of Alzheimer’s disease.

For me, the snowdrop is an elegant and enigmatic example that the simplest things hold beauty not just in their simplicity but also in their hidden complexity. The hidden world of the snowdrop is why it can bloom whilst other plants wait as seeds buried in the soil, why it can become widespread and yet cause no ecological harm, and why it can help and has helped us. Next time you see a snowdrop, remember that you are seeing just the surface of a hidden world, whose depths we are still trying to fully understand.

By Tristian Herbert - Environmental storyteller

A spring enigma: The humble snowdrop