Pretty, yet poisonous, favourite of poets

Wenlock Edge Snowdrops live on, left to fend for themselves in the woods

A dog barks from a house where I once lived. There are snowdrops flowering there that were so familiar and now I'm a stranger. I walk into the ruins of a garden that has been reclaimed by the woods, where the gardener has been estranged for a hundred years. There are clumps of single and double snowdrop varieties that were once highly prized and are now abandoned, rarely seen. They appear as breaths of history.

Whether the snowdrops grew here before the house was built, no one knows. They appear to have been here forever, but there are no records by English herbalists of what the French monasteries called perce-neiges, snowpiercers, growing in the wild in Britain before 1770. Until they found their way into woods and stream banks, snowdrops were for burial grounds, graves, shrines, marking dwellings of the dead. That's what these abandoned flowers do now.