Freezing points

THE Book of Ecclesiastes reminds us that for every-thing there is a season— a time to be born and a time to die. Gardeners know that there is a time to sow and a time to reap.

- Charles Quest-Ritson

January is the time to be gloomy. The days may be getting longer, but the frosts are getting harder. Snow disfigures everything it touches. Sixty years ago, we had 14ft snowdrifts along our mile-long drive in Northumberland and there were still unmelted piles of snow at Winchester when I returned to school after the Easter holidays. Don’t be fooled by climate change —bad winters are certainly not a thing of the past. Another one may be lurking just around the corner.

But one learns from them. I made a big mistake 40 years ago when I found an extraordinary clump of snowdrops in a rook-infested woodland in Wiltshire. The flowers were split down the middle, so that each of its two pedicels carried 2½ petals. Schizoid it may have been, but it also had a distinctive delicacy. The farmer said I could dig it up, so I did so. Then I took it home and potted it up. Soft, refreshing rain watered it nicely. A week later, we had a heavy frost, followed by snow. By the time it had melted and the pot had unfrozen, the snowdrops were reduced to slimy mush. Not one bulb survived. I had learned that plants are much hardier in the ground than in pots.

Snow protects the plants that lie beneath it in alpine meadows. It keeps them dry, too, so, when the great thaw begins and snow turns to water, they have several months of accumulated precipitation to start them into growth. The equation doesn’t work in our climate because it is rain, not snow, that pounds our flower borders from November to March. Except in the big freeze of 1963, of course.