Snow-Piercer: In Praise of Snowdrops – The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

I

In the German district of Neustadt an der Waldnaab, near where the Schwarzbrunnenbach flows westward into the Zottbach, lies the quaint church village of Neuenhammer. It was here, in the middle of the nineteenth century, that the Bavarian civil servant and folklorist Franz Xaver von Schönwerth recorded a local fairy tale concerning the origins of snow’s pure white color, later included in his collection Aus der Oberpfalz. Sitten unad Sagen, or From the Upper Palatinate: Customs and Legends, published in three volumes between 1857 and 1859.

While the reader may be under the impression that snow crystals are simply colorless prisms that reflect all the spectral colors, and thus appear white to our eyes, the bygone villagers of Neuenhammer are deserving of our thanks for having developed a far more interesting and romantic theory.

On the third day of Creation, when “the earth brought forth the green herb, and such as yieldeth seed according to its kind, and the tree that beareth fruit, having seed each one according to its kind,” God apparently also created the snow, and let it fashion a cloak for itself, of whatsoever color it desired. The snow, eager to adorn itself in becoming garments, stooped down and asked the grass of the meadow for its verdant green, only to be haughtily rebuffed.

The snow then requested the deep crimson of the rose, the royal purple of the violet, the cheerful yellow of the sunflower — all in vain, for each of the flowers mocked the snow and sent it packing. Without a color of its own, the snow worried that it would end up like the wind, invisible and furtive. Overcome with doubt and despair, the snow wandered aimlessly until it came across a tiny flower, a snowdrop, which generously offered up its threadbare coat. The snow gladly accepted the gift, and from then on, it was said, the snow would forever be white, and would forever be the enemy of all the other flowers, save the snowdrop.

While the protagonist of this altogether charming story is the snow, it is the deuteragonist I have always found most intriguing. Is the snowdrop the hero, sharing its robes just as Saint Martin of Tours divided his cloak with a beggar? Or is it a villain, collaborating with a common enemy? In either case, this fairy tale provides an explanation not only of why frozen atmospheric water vapor looks as it does, but also why the maverick snowdrop, alone among its fellow members of the vegetable kingdom, is so eager to bloom even before spring arrives, when snowdrifts still blanket the landscape. A remarkable flower, the snowdrop, or Galanthus nivalis, which in German is called a Schneeglöckchen, or “snow-bell,” which accurately conveys the shape of its drooping bell-like flower. But it is the French word for the snowdrop that best encapsulates its hardy, impetuous essence: perce-neige, or snow-piercer.

With its delicate little flower, made up of six petaloid tepals, that dangles from atop a slender scape, and fades after a few weeks, the snowdrop initially suggests the Japanese concept of mono no aware, the awareness of impermanence and the fleeting nature of beauty, but it is in fact incredibly hardy. Its leaves have reinforced tips to break through the snow. Its tissue is equipped with antifreeze glycoproteins to protect against damage from expanding ice crystals. It is quite poisonous, full of toxic alkaloids like lycorine and galantamine, as well as the carbohydrate-binding agglutinin protein, which will cause a fatal agglutination in the gut of any leafhopper or aphid foolhardy enough to dine upon it. No flower is better equipped to go it alone and fend for itself, hence its affinity for the otherwise shunned figure of snow in the Neuenhammer fable.

II

The snowdrop has long captivated botanists, gardeners, and other self-styled galanthophiles, ever since the ancient Greek naturalist Theophrastus labeled it a λευκόἲον, or “white violet,” and remarked that “of the flowers, the first to appear is the white violet. Where the climate is mild, it appears with the first sign of winter, but in more severe climates, later in spring.” Traditionally a symbol of purity and renewal, the diminutive snowdrop has understandably been a favorite of poets. Alfred Lord Tennyson, in “St. Agnes’ Eve,” prayed to the Lord:

Make Thou my spirit pure and clear
As are the frosty skies,
Or this first snowdrop of the year
That in my bosom lies.

While Walter de la Mare, in his haunting poem “The Snowdrop,” detected in the flower a symbol of the Holy Trinity:

From hidden bulb the flower reared up
Its angled, slender, cold, dark stem,
Whence dangled an inverted cup
For tri-leaved diadem.

Beneath these ice-pure sepals lay
A triplet of green-penciled snow,
Which in the chill-aired gloom of day
Stirred softly to and fro.

Yet others have been content to appreciate the snowdrop on a more mundane plane of existence. Maurice Genevoix, a French veteran of the First World War and member of the Académie française, wrote in Images pour un jardin san murs of walking along trails in the Loire Valley, where

J’y courus, je reconnus le perce-neige…ça et là transpercé les feuilles mortes dans sa poussée vers la lumière : quelques-unes palpitaient encore, suspendues, embrochées par un mince poignard vert. Les fleurs aussi paraissaient suspendues. Penchées au haut de leur pétiole, elles laissaient s’échapper, de leur calice encore serré, trois longs pétales d’un blanc mat, trois rayons étalés autour du cœur de la fleur : trois autres pétales plus courts, liserés d’un étroit croissant vert et repliés en rond sur la flamme jaune des étamines. Certains, touchés par le soleil, s’entr’ouvraient davantage et révélaient ainsi le cœur même, un duveteux faisceau de pollen, un doux halo secret dont la fleur resplendissait toute.

[I ran there, and I recognized the snowdrops … here and there emerging from the dead leaves in their push toward the light: some still fluttered, suspended, skewered by a thin green dagger. The flowers also seemed suspended. Leaning at the top of their petiole, they let escape, from their still tight calyx, three long petals of a matte white, three rays spread around the heart of the flower: three other shorter petals, edged with a narrow green crescent and folded in a circle over the yellow flame of the stamens. Some, touched by the sun, opened further and thus revealed the very heart, a downy bundle of pollen, a soft secret halo with which the flower shone entirely.]

Another Francophone writer, the Belgian novelist Marie Gevers, came into even closer contact with snowdrops, describing in her nature study Plaisir des Météores how one can “[p]renez le bout de la tige entre vos lèvres et cueillez du bout de la langue une saveur indéfinissable, un peu acidulée, un peu amère, timide et comme étonnée [take the end of the stem between your lips and collect with the tip of your tongue an indefinable flavor, a little tart, a little bitter, timid, almost as if surprised].” Which, for the record, I do not recommend.

III

While working on the orchestration of Swan Lake in the spring of 1876, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was composing 12 short character pieces for solo piano, one for each month of the year, as commissioned by Nikolay Matveyevich Bernard, editor of the Saint Petersburg music periodical Нувеллист (Le Nouvelliste). Each piece of the The Seasons, published in monthly installments, was accompanied by a poetic epigraph, and so the April issue appeared with the score of Tchaikovsky’s lovely, tinkling Perce-Neige, together with a poem by Apollon Nikolayevich Maykov:

Голубенький, чистый
Подснежник-цветок!
А подле сквозистый,
Последний снежок…
Последние слезы
О горе былом
И первые грезы
О счастье ином.

Goluben’kiy, chistyy
Podsnezhnik–tsvetok!
A podle skvozistyy,
Posledniy snezhok…
Posledniye slezy
O gore bylom
I pervyye grezy
O schast’ye inom.

Pale blue, and pure
The snowdrop flower!
And next to it, translucent,
The last snow…
The last tears
Of a past grief
And the first dreams
Of another happiness.

Maykov’s use of the adjective “goluben’kiy,” comprised of the root word goluboj (blue) and a diminutive suffix, and thus meaning something like pale blue or dove blue, suggests that the poet was not necessarily thinking of the white common snowdrop, Galanthus nivalis, but perhaps another early-blooming flower. And indeed a quick perusal through a handy late nineteenth-century Словарь росийсько–український, or Russian-Ukrainian dictionary, indicates that the word podsnezhnik, which does mean something pretty close to “snow-piercer,” can also refer to flowers including Anemone hepatica (liverwort), Crocus reticulatus, Scilla cernua (Siberian squill), Scilla bifolia (alpine squill), Sempervivum tectorum (common houseleek), as well as the common snowdrop.

The goluben’kiy of Maykov’s podsnezhnik might suggest Puschkinia scilloides, or striped squill, which is a lovely shade of pale blue and can be found in meadows in the Caucasus, along the snow-line, or in ornamental rock gardens throughout Eurasia. Regardless of the precise flower described in Perce-Neige’s epigraph, Tchaikovsky’s piece is an undeniably joyful affair, livelier than the March composition that preceded it, and one feels precious little sorrow as the petals of the snowdrop begin to fall at the end of the piano solo, heralding new dreams of springtime happiness.

IV

The Russian word podsnezhnik, and the Ukrainian word pidsnizhnyk, may encompass more than just the common snowdrop, but there is one place in Ukraine where Galanthus nivalis reigns supreme — Kholodnyi Yar, near Chyhyryn in the Cherkasy Oblast, not far from where the Tiasmyn enters the wide Dnieper. It is here, in the forest glades of Kholodnyi Yar National Nature Park, that one of the largest populations of snowdrops in the world has taken root, some sixty hectares in extent. Protected and studied by the Cherkasy Oblast Association for Nature Protection, the Cherkasy-based Bohdan Khmelnytsky National University, and the Hryshko National Botanical Garden, the snowdrops of Kholodnyi Yar have been found to be identical to the poculiform snowdrops that are endemic to, and previously thought to be confined to, the Crimean peninsula.

The state of martial law in Ukraine has, since March of 2022, generally prevented visitors from entering the forests of the nature park, but last spring the Cherkasy Regional Military Administration began granting temporary permit to visit the Bilosnizhny Botanical Reserve, where the snowdrops fight through the snow and burst into bloom each year.

How dearly I would love to see these snowdrops carpeting the land, just as I would love to see some of the other famous snowdrop gardens scattered throughout Europe — at Bank Hall in Lancashire, or at Finlaystone in Renfrewshire, or at Alcsút Palace in Hungary’s Fejér County. But in the meantime we have planted snowdrop bulbs in our own garden, and they indeed pierced the snow in late January, came into bloom in late February, and the petals, like threadbare robes, are now falling away.

Unlike the crocuses, which have been set upon by various rodents, and the netted irises, whose flowers proved beautiful but terribly short-lived, the snowdrops have flourished, and now their seeds will be scattered, and the elaiosomes at the ends of those seeds, full of succulent lipids and proteins, will prove irresistible to the ants who will further disseminate all the snowdrop fruits. Underground, meanwhile, offsets or bulblets will form around the parent bulb, and the seemingly fragile, but in actuality nearly invincible, snowdrops will gradually take over their patch of the garden. It may not be Kholodnyi Yar, but it will do for now.

In the Snowdrop Their Is Hope

Looking out at the snowdrops slowly colonizing the garden, each of them identical, each of them perfect, each of them representing purity, renewal, and hope for the future, I have been reminded of the immortal words of G.K. Chesterton, inspired by the daisy, but equally applicable to the snowdrop, the snow-bell, the snow-piercer, the milk-flower, the February fair-maid, the Candlemas bells, Eve’s tears, corpse-in-its-shroud, or whatever else you may wish to call these unique products of the third day of Creation:

Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.

The praiseworthy monotony of the snowdrop’s life cycle — a desperate confrontation with the elements, a brief florescence, and a long hibernation, before yet another struggle, and yet another happiness to come.

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