Snowdrop events 2011

[chasw]

Maggi our minis are very extensively travelled we normally do the International Mini Meet each year 2011 is Switzerland,and in the past Denmark,Spain ,Netherlands,Poland,Bavaria, ........ oh and just realised that the gala is in Banbury which is Oxfordshire so the next county   

[chasw]

Well the postmans just been with our gala forms John ,Jan and I have been looking through the other events,and think we may venture over to the Netherlands,as we have friends living not far from Arnhem, that would mean missing the CGS day such a shame

[Toft Tops]

I haven't received a Gala application form and we haven't got any snow as yet!

[Martin Baxendale]

I've sent off my gala application. For a change it's not too far from here.

[Toft Tops]

At last!  Having had no post for 4 days mine has finally arrived - in a snowstorm.  Fingers crossed.

[Maggi Young]

Hanneke van Dijt asked me today to add details of her snowdrop trip to my web site. The details are are here
http://www.snowdropinfo.com/europetrip.htm

Hanneke's new book Galanthomania is out at the end of January from Amazon and all other good book stores.

Bloembollen Visie    www.cnb.nl/nl/bloembollenvisie    ...  the  Dutch Journal for bulb growers, publishes its Journal on the web and there is a most interesting article from the issue of July 2010 by Hanneke van Dijk about Galanthus classification.     
Hanneke has worked on this classification together with Wim Snoeijer for her new book, mentioned  by Mark.
 Here is the article from  Bloembollen Visie, divided into two parts to allow it to be sized for loading here..... 

 Galanthus article_Part1.pdf (496 kB - downloaded 149 times.)

 Galanthus article_Part2.pdf (434.8 kB - downloaded 104 times.)

[mark smyth]

Maggi I think you are seriously hooked now or are you suffereing from snow blindness?

I cant read them

[Maggi Young]

Mark, I could care less!   It's being stuck in the snow, I think.
I think there is enough detail to work out how the classification goes.... and run the text through google translate for an idea  (admittedly only an 'idea',since some words it gives you are crazy!) to get the gist of it..... it's a great way to spend a snow bound day!

[mark smyth]

I should I added I cant read them because it looks like web site code

[Maggi Young]

How strange.... I can open them from the link..... I'll see if I can save them another way.....

[Maggi Young]

I'll load the four pages here as jpg files.... they will be larger than the usual web pictures to allow  for easier reading ! ( I hope!!)

Click the images to enlarge......

[Thomas Seiler]

Thank you Maggi for these articles.
As Dutch is quite close to German, I can read most of it. There are now 10 artificial groups of snowdrops, only using the looking of the flower for grouping them. It does not matter, whether a cultivar is a variation of a species or a hybrid. This is not biological, but simple and easy for registration.

[Maggi Young]

Thanks Thomas, yes, I understood that the purpose was to make registration more simple for KVAB etc.

[Martin Baxendale]

I haven't had much time to think this through,  but off the top of my head I have a feeling that I'd have gone for a classification for registration purposes more on species lines, since so many named snowdrop cultivars are simply selections of a small number of quite easily identifiable species, even if it meant more categories - i.e. the same sorts of categories given here, but separated under each species - e.g. nivalis green, elwesii green, hybrid green, etc. I might even have tried to devise categories for specific common hybrid groups like plicatus x nivalis, with a group for unidentifiable hybrids.

Yes, yes, I know that's virtually a botanical classification. Maybe I'm looking at it from a breeder's point of view - that I'd like to be able to see at a glance what the ancestry of the cultivar is, which is useful for future breeding, and under this system there is no indication of species or hybridity (unless that's given in the registration notes - but then that means you have to search through for specific species or specific types of hybrid.

Ah what do I know?

[Martin Baxendale]

Thinking about it, I suppose for general garden purposes and for most gardeners the exact species or hybridity of a cultivar is not that important since all the species are essentially very similar - unlike say lilies where there are wide variations in flower types and cultivation requirements between different species and groups of species and where it would be daft to simply categorise lily cultivars by flower colour. So I guess I am being a nit-picking little breeder.