A brush with snowdrops

Tilly Ware meets the artist and galanthophile John Morley in his Suffolk garden, home to the oldest snowdrop nursery in the country

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THE 2024 North Green Snowdrops catalogue is now a collector's item. After 40 years, the artist and serious galanthophile John Morley has decided to close his business, the oldest snowdrop nursery in the country. His first catalogue in 1984, written in green ink by a former typist of Winston Churchill's and printed on folded foolscap, listed 22 different snowdrops ranging from $2.50 and $5 per bulb. In the early years, Mr Morley's eloquent plant descriptions were accompanied by his exquisite woodcuts, paintings and line drawings; the later catalogues include glossy photos and increasingly exciting rarities, many of which Mr Morley discovered in his own garden in north Suffolk.

Gardening and art were always intertwined for Mr Morley, whose grandfather was a gardener, and he remembers going to his allotments to draw. Trained at the Royal Academy (RA), he was initially a landscape painter, but became obsessed by auriculas, buying choice varieties from famed breeder Gordon Douglas and painting them for him. Snowdrops began to intrigue him as they were out at such 'an interesting time of year, and I could surround myself with flowers in winter'.

Mr Morley met his wife, Diana, when teaching at the RA in the 1970s. Together, they found a set of near-derelict cottages on a Suffolk estate and decided they were 'going to make Sissinghurst here'. The house is a ramble of old brick floors and richly coloured rooms crammed with Mr Morley's paintings, engravings, books and ceramics. The garden wraps itself around the building, with tall yew hedges buffering against the easterlies.