9 Comments
Feb 22, 2023Liked by Jane Brocket

This may have been short but it was very sweet. I always like to find a snowdrop on New Year’s Day not alas in our garden, where I have made numerous attempts to grow them in the green but they seem to disappear without trace. As often happens with your writing I am taken down rabbit holes of further discoveries - this time it is the Peace Window in St John’s church Langliffe and a curiosity to see the window and to discover the website of the artist Ann Sotheran.

This is my third favourite of your substack newsletters; the first being the New Year’s Day one and second one being the milk bottle one. I think you would do a really good ‘pegging out’ one so many great paintings around on the topic including the one hitherto unknown by me on today’s Persephone Post.

Finally I would like to you for telling us about Oliver Burkeman whose podcasts I found so interesting. So many resonations (have I made up a word) with all the things I’ve mentioned.

Thank you Jane. 😊

Expand full comment

What an uplifting post, which managed to transform my mood this morning, sad at the anniversary of my mother’s death. I would love any of the images you have posted, but I particularly loved the tremendous energy of the Mabel Royds woodcut, full of the promise of all conquering spring!

Expand full comment

I transplanted snow drops from my great grandmother’s stoop to mine so I may always have a tangible reminder of her and the lilting fragrance at her doorstep. They pouted three, four, five years by giving me only tufts of green… then they started, perhaps grudgingly, to give a flower or two… now I have a wee mound each spring and they’ve decided perhaps they’ll accept their new home…

Expand full comment

Jane, When you say nothing happened re your snowdrops the year after planting, do you mean they just had leaves with no flowers or do you mean that literally nothing came up. I too planted some Sam Arnott snowdrops last year and this year there is nothing to show for it. Can I still have hope for next year?

Expand full comment

A very new subscriber here, drawn in by your post on Proust (as someone who wrote a very middling PhD thesis on Proust and Flaubert in another life), then disconcerted by posts on quilting (as someone who still bears the scars of traumatic sewing and knitting lessons at school and is unable to do either), and finally delighted by posts on milk bottles and Flanders (both of which I love). As a very young child I was lucky enough to live in a house with a snowdrop walk - drifts and swathes of snowdrops along a woodland path. They had been planted by my great-grandfather (or more probably by his gardener). I used to pick handfuls to bring in to my grandmother. Now snowdrop-less for over 50 years, I at last have a garden where I can try to establish them, and have started this year with some in the green from Cambo Estate in Fife. I'll take heart from your experience that they might disappear for a year and then return.

Expand full comment

I love these, and am inspired to make something of my own, thank you Jane! And agreed about the word/phonemes/graphemes having particular appeal...

Expand full comment

i've never seen snowdrops in real life, so i really enjoyed your post. i've usually lived where it's too warm.

Expand full comment