Snowdrop Days

Today was the final day of Chelsea Physic Garden's popular 'Snowdrop Days' event and thanks to the winter sunshine across London, I'm sure visitors would have been there in droves, ending it all on a high. This week I had my own special snowdrop day when, meeting up with friends from the Garden, I was presented with an exquisite 'Galanthus Lyn' plant which is now safely embedded under a tree in my own garden. In the near future, it might also come in useful. The common snowdrop - not that my little beauty is 'common', you understand - contains an alkaloid, galanthamine, which has been approved for use in the management of Alzheimer’s disease. For some inexplicable reason, I forgot my bank card PIN number today and so had to go through the tiresome palaver of re-setting it. Maybe I need to start chomping on snowdrop bulbs to help jog my poor old memory. Only joking, of course, as in their raw form, snowdrop plants are poisonous. Just like daffodil bulbs which I read this week, are being carefully removed from sale anywhere near onions these days as folks might mistake them for onions with equally serious results. So let's keep our snowdrops safely at bay, enjoy their defiant fragility and welcome them as the traditional harbinger of spring.