In the low winter sunshine of Jo Hynes’s Devon garden, early bumblebees alight on snowdrops, crocuses and cyclamen. The temperature is still low, the days still short, but Hynes has nurtured a great carpet of early flowers, mingled together and stretched out beneath trees and shrubs, many of the shrubs winter-flowering too. She chose this style of planting partly to mimic the way they grow in the wild. “In the Caucasus you see these wonderful meadows of cyclamen and snowdrops, all mixed up together, great sheets of them,” she says.
While the plants may be native to Turkey (which has the widest range of snowdrops), western Russia and the Mediterranean, Hynes’s garden, known as Higher Cherubeer, is very British. “We get a lot of rain here,” she says, “and the soil is acidic clay, so it stays particularly moist. And we are at the top of a hill – 150 metres above sea level in between Dartmoor and Exmoor.”
You might think that Mediterranean plants would struggle here, but in fact, there is a great range of snowdrops to suit all sorts of conditions. The snowdrops that are commonly grown in the UK – Galanthus plicatus, G elwesii and G nivalis – all like moisture. In Higher Cherubeer, though, they are helped by being grown under trees and shrubs. “Cyclamen and snowdrops flower in the late winter and early spring, and in doing so they make the most of the time when there is no canopy to the trees,” Hynes says. “Then, when the trees are in growth, the conditions encourage them to go into dormancy, just as the heat does in the Mediterranean summer.”
Hynes and her husband, Tom, arrived at Higher Cherubeer 31 years ago. It was a working dairy farm at the time, and what is now the garden was a rough, windy field with vegetable strips and a bit of orchard. The first thing they did was to put in a shelter belt of native trees to slow down the winds; over time gravel paths were put in place, and trees and borders were planted. Tom is a stonewaller and has created steps and walls from which ferns and cyclamen spring. They give the garden a strong structure that is particularly visible, and useful, in winter.
The impetus to make it a winter garden came after Hynes took up basket weaving 10 years ago. “I wanted a source of colourful stems, so planted up willows that could be cut back each year to provide long, whippy, colourful weaving material. Then I wanted to plant flowers that would look good alongside them, so started planting snowdrops, cyclamen, hellebores, witch hazels.” She wanted to open the garden to visitors, but, she says: “Devon is a county with lots of gardens and not that many people.”
So she decided to start a National Collection – which involves collecting and growing a significant number of one type of plant, and is overseen by the UK charity Plant Heritage – to draw visitors into the garden. She chose cyclamen as there is a manageable number to collect, and because they flower in winter: “There are only two or three gardens open in Devon in February,” she says.
Hynes now grows 22 of the 23 known cyclamen species and many of their forms and cultivars in the garden, and more than 400 snowdrop varieties. She has developed some favourites over the years, such as snowdrop “S Arnott”, a late-flowered cultivar with a beautiful scent, which she uses as the main drifts within the borders, and “Daisy Hynes”, a neat snowdrop with green markings, named after their daughter. She recommends Cyclamen coum, C alpinum and C pseudibericum, all of which naturalise well under trees and shrubs, and flower with the snowdrops from January to March. Hynes grows all of the cyclamen and many of the snowdrops in pots in her greenhouses, where their subtle differences can be appreciated up close by aficionados.
Beyond the beauty of filling the garden with flowers in late winter, and the joy Hynes evidently gets from her visitors, there is a great benefit to wildlife in planting such early flowers. “I was a beekeeper when I first arrived,” she says, “and I wanted to plant nectar-rich flowers for my bees. Honeybees are awake all through winter and on warm days they will venture out, so by planting in this way I was able to provide them with pollen. Late-winter and early-spring flowers help hives to make it through winter.”
For native bumblebees this is possibly even more important. They will also fly on mild winter days, and unlike honeybees they have no store of honey to fall back on. “Insects of all kinds are increasingly likely to venture out in winter as our weather becomes less predictable,” says Hynes. “We can all help them out by planting crocuses, cyclamen, Anemone blanda and pollen-rich plants such as native Helleborus foetidus. They make the garden beautiful even in one of the coldest months of winter, and the bees love them.”
Higher Cherubeer is open for the National Garden Scheme on 11 and 19 February.
