February 2025

Somerset’s famous cottage garden at East Lambrook Manor will be celebrating the snowdrop season with what may be its final annual Festival of Snowdrops.

Somerset’s famous cottage garden at East Lambrook Manor will be celebrating the snowdrop season with what may be its final annual Festival of Snowdrops, as it is hoped new owners will take over in the spring. Stroll through the beautiful winter garden and enjoy the wonderful collection of unusual snowdrops. 
 
Cottage garden doyenne and keen ‘galanthophile’ Margery Fish and her husband Walter turned the drainage channel between two orchards into the perfect place for planting her growing collection of snowdrops in the 1940s, and the bulbs have thrived there ever since. “It’s such a welcome sight to see the sides of The Ditch carpeted with snowdrops in February,” says current owner Mike Werkmeister, “and it’s where all the unusual snowdrops named for previous owners were found, most notably delicate G. ‘Margery Fish’. It’s the sight I shall miss most when I move.”
 
The garden has a collection of around 140 named varieties and many of these are used to make a special snowdrop display in a raised bed enabling visitors to appreciate the subtle and often not so subtle differences between them.
 
Around 90 varieties of snowdrop will be on sale in the nursery along with hellebores and other spring bulbs and plants. Sculptor Chris Kampf will again be exhibiting his popular steel snowdrops.

www.eastlambrook.com