Divide your snowdrops ‘in the green’ for dreamy white drifts

If you’ve looked longingly at drifts of dreamy white snowdrops this season and compared them to your own small clumps do not despair! Dividing snowdrops while they are ‘in the green’ – just after flowering – is a great way to increase your yield and to create your own wonderful, dreamy drifts. Now, in early March, is the time to get busy and it’s very simple.

“Moving snowdrops when they are ‘in the green’ is easily done and much more successful than planting bulbs,” says garden owner Grainne Jakobson. “I’ve been using this method for five years and if you compare the underplanting in the photo of the birches in my garden taken in 2018 with the short video on this page shot last week,  you’ll see just how effective it can be.”

Here are Grainne’s top tips:

• Choose a day when the soil isn’t frozen or waterlogged. Use a spade to gently lift the clump you want to split and make sure that there is soil around the bulbs.
• Gently prise them apart with your hands into a few small clumps with the soil intact. Make some holes where you want more snowdrops and pop the clumps in, you can sprinkle a little bone meal into the hole first but if you have good soil it isn’t really necessary.
• Water them in well.

There are a few tools on the market, actually designed for planting trees, that can help protect your knees when dividing snowdrops. Google planting tools for more!

Grainne, is a garden owner and Assistant County Organiser who opens her garden Woodend House for the National Garden Scheme by arrangement May to Sept for groups of up to 25
Find out more here

You can follow her top tips for alliums here