February 2024

Throughout February Somerset’s famous cottage garden at East Lambrook Manor will be celebrating the snowdrop season with its popular annual festival. 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 1940’s and the bulbs have thrived there ever since. “It gladdens the heart to see the snowdrops lining the banks of the famous Ditch in this gem of a garden,” says owner Mike Werkmeister.

The garden has a collection of around 140 named varieties and many of these are used to make a special display in a raised bed enabling visitors to appreciate the subtle and often not so subtle difference between them. Visitors are often amazed by the different shapes and colours of the flowers, including delicate Galanthus ‘Margery Fish’, found in the Ditch in 1987.

Join a snowdrop talk/ tour to learn about the genus and see some of the more unusual snowdrops in the garden. Around 80 varieties 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