An Iowa Garden

In the fall of 2005, I obtained a handful of bulbs of a species of snowdrop new to our garden; Galanthus ikariae. It was new to the garden, but not new to me, as I had read about it in Dicky Graff's classic book Flowers in the Winter Garden. In her garden it "made one gallant attempt to show what it could do in a congenial climate...neither flowers nor foliage proved tough enough to stand a succession of hard freezes." Mind you her congenial climate was zone 7 Long Island as opposed to the graveyard of horticultural expectations in zone 5a that I call home. I therefore didn't hold out much hope for it here, especially when it started pushing out its shiny green foliage during a brief mild spell last January. It did survive though, and bloomed lustily as shown above. I entered a rather modest piece on it on this blog (though I might have used the phrase "While some well-known gardeners have not had success growing it, it threatens to become a weed here." I did vaguely know that there seems to be some confusion in differentiating out some of the species of galanthus, and that some seem to lump ikariae with woronowii, and perhaps even latifolius. I was just noodling around on the web site of the Scotttish Rock Garden Club, and there was an extensive discussion of galanthus, with beautiful, clear pictures. One author stated unequivocally that ikariae is a very distinct species from woronowii; the foliage is alike, but the markings on the flowers are quite different, and he said that almost all of the bulbs sold in commerce as ikariae are in fact the much more common and pedestrian woronowii. The green blotch on the inner petals of woronowii is small, usually somewhat heart shaped, and there is a prominent notch in the petals at their apex, at the middle of the green blotch...in otherwords, just like my supposed rare, ever-so-tender ikariae. Woronowii is probably much hardier (coming as it does from southern Russia and northern Turkey, rather than from the hot Aegeaen Islands like ikariae... woronowii, in fact has made itself at home and naturalised in Great Britain). The green blotch on the tube, or inner petals of ikariae is much larger and squarish; it sort of looks like a molar tooth broken off half way down the roots.
So, my prize snowdrop, a bulb that the legendary Dicky Graff couldn't grow on Long Island, turns out to be a common little seed-about, probably dug up from a ditch somewhere in Great Britain. Dicky probably couldn't grow Big Boy tomatoes worth a hoot, though.