Snowdrop SENSATION

At a time when gardens mostly sleep, it is a rare pleasure to find one that is awakening from its slumbers, and shrugging off a frosty shroud to reveal shivering snowdrops, golden aconites and lustrous crocuses. Peeping through the silvered, tightly cropped grass that carpets sunlit glades and woodland alike, these midwinter marvels have become a familiar sight to Karin and Christopher Proudfoot: but it was not always so. ‘When we first moved here, the display was muted, but by encouraging the bulbs to spread, the numbers have swelled over many years to create a breathtaking show,’ they explain from The Old Rectory in Fawkham, Kent.

The 1.5-acre garden and woodland wraps around three sides of the Georgian rectory, but when it was first viewed by the couple in 1983, it presented a very different picture. ‘A few daffodils peeped above tangled grass, and there were a number of overgrown shrubs and hybrid tea roses that we soon removed,’