Please don’t eat the snowdrops
Snowdrops in the neighborhood.
Just when it seemed winter would never end, early flowering snowdrops showed up right in front of a house not far from here just the other day, proving that spring really is coming and you should never give up hope. Adam and Eve didn’t.
Remember that legend where they’re stumbling around in the snow after getting kicked out of Eden, still dressed for Plato’s Retreat and crying their eyes out over their rotten luck? Well, I looked up the Garden of Eden and it turns out that it’s popularly believed to have been located in southern Iraq where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers flow into the Persian Gulf. You wouldn’t think there’d be much snow in that neighborhood, but they actually do get some, especially in the higher altitudes. (It even snows in Bethlehem once in a while, so quit snickering at that cotton on the roof of the manger.)
Anyway, the story goes that an angel turned some of Adam and Eve’s snow into snowdrops to give them hope for the future, and it worked, although at the time they didn’t know anything about how Cain was going to turn out.
In the Republic of Moldova, which sits between Romania and Ukraine, there is a story about a dragon which captured the Sun and kept it locked up inside a castle. Moldova is where the Carpathian Mountains are located, so they have a lot of this kind of thing going on there. Anyway, it got wicked cold and dark and the children stopped singing and the garlic and wolfbane refused to grow, and it was a real mess until a brave young man volunteered to go and fight the dragon. They had a terrible battle that the young man won, only to succumb in the end to his wounds. But the Sun, now free again, rose and lit things up for the first time in ages, and where the hero’s blood had fallen, out came, you guessed it, snowdrops. Somehow, after a winter here, none of this seems particularly strange to me.
Moldovan men celebrate the springtime festival of Martisor by giving snowdrops to the women in their lives as a symbol of rebirth. But the flowers didn’t always enjoy that reputation everywhere they grew. When snowdrops first started showing up in western Europe, they were popular with monks who liked to sprinkle them around churchyards where they brought a little much-needed cheer in early spring. But the association with graves rubbed off and the flowers developed a bad reputation in some circles. For this reason, it’s still considered bad luck to bring snowdrops indoors so, to be on the safe side, pick up a nice bunch of daffodils at your local nursery instead.
A single snowdrop, seen growing alone, is considered by some people to be a sure sign that a calamity is about to happen. And if you were hungry at the time, this might or might not become the case. Some websites I found touted snowdrops as not only edible, but good for the digestion, and a natural remedy for “memory problems, myasthenia, neuralgia and nerve pains.” Interestingly, several other sites pointed out that most animals, including rabbits and alpacas, won’t eat them. However, people in the Caucasus Mountains have evidently been using snowdrop bulbs for some time in the symptomatic treatment of both polio and Alzheimer’s disease. The bulbs contain an alkaloid called galantamine (snowdrops belong to the genus galanthus), which has been synthesized for use in a number of modern drugs prescribed for treating Alzheimer’s. So there you go. Who knew?
I hasten to point out here that you can find a whole lot of stuff on the Internet which carries nobody’s seal of approval, least of all mine. For this reason, I have deliberately neglected to identify the location of the patch of snowdrops in the accompanying photo so as not to encourage any illegal grazing.
