..............Yet the priestly class have enough to sell in their catalogues........what is their secret?
I think it is wrong thinking to believe there is a secret. The people who
think they have the secret are just the ones who have been lucky enough not to suffer a major misfortune so far.
They may also be lucky to be gardening on soil that snowdrops do well in, but I don't think anyone really knows quite what that is. For example, I have a little bed directly in front of my house about 2m wide by 30 cm deep. Snowdrops planted on the left half of this bed have done very well. Any attempt to grow snowdrops on the right half of the bed has failed rapidly and completely.
Most of my snowdrops are grown in a raised bed (not the bed of the previous paragraph). This is divided in two. One half has soil from my garden and the other half has soil kindly donated by Anglesey Abbey. I am trying to keep track of every single bulb planted in this bed to see if there is a difference. At this stage it is too early to say as the test has only been running a couple of years.