Someone said a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. This is how I feel. As I write neat sheets of snow fold themselves at the foot of the solar panels, sliding and refreezing in the uncertain thaw of this unexpected wintry spell. An intestinal bulge in the jet-stream has brought us a bolus of arctic air which has coincided with a moisture laden storm up from the Bay of Biscay and left ten people dead in Britain. As I trudged about yesterday in builder’s trousers and anorak, warm but looking like a tramp, I thought of how modern life just doesn’t equip a lot of people to cope with cold of this sort. Can furry headphone ear-muffs compete with a hat?
The best before date on a snowdrop is when the sheer, cell-thick spathe unscrolls enough to allow the flower its first contact with an air current. Prior to this moment it has been a tissue missile launched skywards by pathetic warmth. Did a plant ever so vividly show the power of cell expansion? It’s not growth as we normally understand it, the increase and specialisation of tissue, but inflation, popcorn in a popcorn popper, a dried prawn cracker hitting the fat, an indoor firework entertaining young and old on the Christmas dinner table. The requisite number of cells are all sitting there, ready to go. Each only needs its atomic bicycle pump. A little vegetable Apollo launched on its moon-bound trajectory through the spring sediment. Nosing forcefully upwards, forcefully, like a dog nosing you in the crutch. Each leaf a cat’s-tail dipped in white, the purity belying its role, a dispensable sloughable shock absorber abraded by its passage through a cruel pudding of stones and clay. The pressure exerted by growing pea shoots, I read online, can be 72 pounds per square inch. Butch snowdrops may wish to draw attention to this fact, rather than to their ethereal fragrance and association with the virgin, Mary, hardly an exclusive attribute in the world of botany. Here it is, look, a plodding plant whose alternative oxidase short-circuiting respiration in its mitochondria has probably melted the snow-hole through which it greets February. I prefer perce-neige to snowdrop, focussing as it does on the first shoot-thrustingness of the year. No-one ever referred to drops of snow; the partitive is flake. And perhaps it sits too close to pear drops in the brain.
Anyway, finally, there they dangle. Emblobbed, teardrops at last, gathering en masse to hear a ser
mon from the soil in their churchyards up and down the land. Tepals splayed languorously, the hard work done, now it’s up to the bees. Cue the scent: does it in fact have one? We want it to badly. The poets in us clearly do not want such a heroic and beautiful flag-bearer to be short of a critical attribute. Walter-de-la-mare thought they smelled of snow; Richard Mabey agreed with Gerard that they were sweet and nectarous. A website selling perfumed candles, exploiting our fetish for all things natural, hedges its bets by authoritatively stating that “essence of snowdrop adds a freshness and coolness”; what a surprise. I note with the usual mixture of delight and disappointment that said website illustrates its snowdrop page with images of Leucojum and, shockingly, lily-of-the-valley. A taxonomic faux-pas equivalent to confusing cat and cow.
My sense of smell is perhaps not up to the job. But I wonder if the dangling parachutes cup still air where the sparse molecules can build up? I once hunted out Erica erigena, which beats even snowdrops to the early pollinators, my photos dated 6.1.08. I homed in on its colour on the grey cliff, but on entering a metre space of it was struck hammer-like by the perfume, a cooling tower cloud stretching unmeasurably up into the blue as the waves crashed on the shore and the sun shone on bravely.