Snowdrops at Candlemas: there’s no fairer tribute to loved ones than ‘Mary’s Tapers’

Into brown paper bags went the bulbs I would need for a particular project. Snowdrops, of course; I picked the familiar Galanthus nivalis for its early flowers, love of dappled shade and willingness to spread. 

Then narcissi; the delicate Lent Lily depicted in Cicely Mary Barker’s Flower Fairies of the Spring, set to bloom around Ash Wednesday, naturalise nicely. This Lenten flower, also known as the “Wild Lily”, is thought to be the daffodil that inspired Wordsworth, not those great gold trumpets that will be blaring from every municipal planting scheme in another month or so. 

Lastly, to take over when the Lent Lily starts to fade in late March, another old variety, narcissus WP Milner: its petals of pale straw fading to milky-white.

I’d ordered hundreds of these varieties, plus some tulips, to plant out in our orchard. They would multiply underground, creating a lovelier display each year. I scooped out perhaps half a dozen of each from the trugs in the potting shed to take to Mum’s grave. 

With shock I realised it will be 25 years this May since she died. Her death, when I was an undergraduate with three teenage siblings and a father whom she had longed to leave, had the fallout of an atomic weapon. Years later, sitting in group therapy, I managed to articulate what it had meant. “The family died when she died,” I said, simply. 

Since Mum died I have moved through life with a rent in my heart that nothing has managed to plug: not the partying of my twenties, nor the weight of my new, slippery babies placed on my chest, and not God. “Well, of course you chose a matriarchal religion,” was one friend’s verdict when I was received into the Church, and I think she was onto something. Whilst Our Lady is a comfort, I am still learning to sit with the twisting slipperiness of grief and the chimera that one day one might “come to terms” with it, whatever that means. 

But for most of the people who packed the village church for her funeral, with their busy lives and their own problems, and now grandchildren and rackety retirement plans, the waters closed over my mother’s head a long time ago. It’s years since I visited the grave to find fresh flowers already there. Sometimes there are a few desiccated, skeletal stalks poking out of the vessel embedded in the base of the headstone for this purpose. I have chucked them on the compost, left little plants in pots – lavender, rosemary for remembrance – in the hope they will have greater longevity, be less attractive to the rabbits, yet all too aware that these, too will soon dry out, their horrid plastic pots going to landfill. 

Then, last winter – after the funeral of a wonderful man, a renowned professor of theoretical physics – I saw the churchyard as I never have before, the older part with its Victorian angels and lichen-speckled graves carpeted with snowdrops. At Candlemas we always walk amongst the spectacular snowdrops at Walsingham Abbey, yet I’d always shied away from my mother’s grave in winter, and had no idea these “Fair Maids of February” – to give them one of their folk names – had colonised this graveyard, too. 

This I could do for her; a long, low-maintenance tribute which, with some successional planting, would stretch beyond Easter. Last autumn I telephoned Mary, the professor’s widow, who is one of my oldest friends (in both senses). Would she like me to plant bulbs on Rodney’s grave, too? 

A kind friend had already planted snowdrops, she said, then sighed. Was I aware of the regulations? Planting was only permitted to a depth of two feet in front of the headstone. Anything else would be cut down when the groundsman began mowing again at the start of March. My Lent lilies would barely have raised their heads before they were chopped off. And as snowdrops and narcissi store energy for the next year’s blooms in their leaves, cutting back foliage is fatal. 

So I put the bulbs set aside for Mum back in the trug, to go out in the orchard here. I couldn’t face the four-hour round trip to plant a scant handful of snowdrops cheek-by-jowl with her headstone. I looked up the regulations online: whilst they are proscriptive about planting flowers commonly found in the grounds of old abbeys and priories and country churchyards, they say nothing about the proliferation of more modern foil, plastic, gaudy forms of tribute that, to my mind, despoil sacred spaces.

Snowdrops at Candlemas, which falls midway between the winter solstice and spring equinox, symbolise of rebirth, new life, resurrection. They are also exquisitely scented and beautiful. In the Middle Ages, people would bring their candles to be blessed in church.  

Glowing white in the dark corners of woods and churchyards, there can be no fairer tribute to loved ones than these little flowers known in some parts, I have just discovered, as Candlemas Bells – or Mary’s Tapers. Perhaps, like my faith, it makes perfect sense that I was drawn to them

Photo: A carpet of snowdrops in the grounds of Burton Agnes Hall, Bridlington, England, 15 February 2022. The woodland adjoining Burton Agnes Hall, a manor house which dates from 1173, is famed for the thousands of snowdrops which emerge every February. (Photo by OLI SCARFF/AFP via Getty Images.)

This article appears in the February 2025 magazine edition of the Catholic Herald. To subscribe to our thought-provoking and high-calibre magazine and have independent, counter-cultural and orthodox Catholic journalism delivered to your door anywhere in the world click HERE.

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