Glory of the snow

By Joyce Arleen Corson
Guest Columnist

The dark earth of winter becomes bright with the covering of snow and we feel happy with the Glory of the Snow.

In my growing up years I lived in the country and the flat land was for growing crops or garden vegetables for our diet. Flowers were limited to rows of zinnias and marygolds surrounding the garden.

Joyce Arleen Corson

I first saw Glory of the Snow in a giant truck load of mulch that had been dumped in a pile in my new neighbors back yard. Not uncommon, summer coming the new residents wanting to get a start on their landscape design.

A few weeks went by and I noticed the pile had erupted into many, many bright blue and white flowers. Finding out later the very invasive bulb, native to Turkey, had invaded the load of mulch. Nothing was done that year with landscaping. We all enjoyed, the rare blue color.

Some times if it’s a flower you know you want, you defy all odds to live with it for the season. In the case of Glory of the Snow it is not native to our habitat.

Glory bulbs are native to Turkey. They produce a mass of lovely star-shaped flowers with deep green strappy leaves. Each bulb bears five to 10 blooms on thick short brown stems.

The blooms are up to three-fourths an inch across and face upward, showing creamy white throats. The most common Glory of the Snow bulbs produces blue flowers, but they also come in white and pink cultivars.

Flowers finish blooming by mid to late spring, but the bright foliage persists until early fall. The plants grow approximately 6 inches tall and form clumps that spread over time.

Chionodoxa is hardy in USDA zones 3 to 8. Plant your spring blooming bulbs in fall. You can use these plants as accents in spring planters or containers, in rockeries, along paths, or in the early perennial garden.

The specific epithet is in honour of Lucile, the wife of the Swiss botanist Pierre Edmond Boissier (1810-1885). It belongs to a group of scill a species that were formerly put in a separate genus, chionodoxa, and may now be treated as scillasect. Lucile is also the name of my mother.

Honey bees favor colors in range from purple to blue.