Snowdrops: It’s snowtime, folks

Snowdrops are getting earlier. That's the received opinion. But so much depends on where you live. And much also seems to depend on the position of the snowdrops themselves. One patch of the amazing snowdrop called 'Atkinsii' was full out in our garden before Christmas. And yet another patch, growing along the same, south-facing boundary, 10 yards further down towards the house, peaked at the beginning of this month, six weeks later. The snowdrops all came from the same source, a clump growing in ivy in our old garden, so there's no question of their being distinct types. There must be some difference in temperature, or amount of direct sun each spread receives to push on or hold back the flowers in this way. It's a mystery.

So, since I have to write these columns ahead of the time you, the reader, see them, it's a chancy business predicting what snowdrops might be doing. When I walked up to the enchanting little folly called The Red House at Painswick Rococo Garden in Gloucestershire, 'Atkinsii' snowdrops were still plastered thickly on either side of the path. But will they still be looking good now? If not, then perhaps the vast spreads down in the wood at the bottom of this extraordinary garden will have peaked instead.

'Atkinsii', practically twice the size of the common snowdrop, is named after a Northamptonshire nurseryman, James Atkins, who retired to Painswick and devoted himself to what he loved best – snowdrops. So it's a particularly appropriate place to find them flourishing in such a spectacular fashion. The Red House is at the top of the valley, backed by a hanging wood. From there, several paths meander down to the wood at the bottom, where millions of wild snowdrops push through ivy and dead fronds of ferns.

The garden was first laid out in the 1740s and a famous painting by Thomas Robins shows it with serpentine paths, quixotic follies, and a grand formal vegetable garden in the centre. But gradually it slipped away until a bold restoration recently brought the garden back to life. Already by 1988 the old Painswick tradition of Snowdrop Sunday had been revived, when for a single day in February the garden was thrown open to people in the village. Now the snowdrops have become so famous, a third of all visitors to the garden come in January and February. Paul Moir, who's in charge of the Painswick garden, reckons that they put on a good show now for four or five weeks.

You need the weather of course and, in a season that's been memorable only for its hideous succession of dark, rainy days, I happened to be at Painswick when the sun was shining, the views long, the trees magnificently silhouetted against a blue sky. I like trees better in winter than summer. The form becomes the chief point of them, not just the mass of green that is all we see in summer. And because the situation of the Painswick garden is so extraordinary, you get long views both across and down, snowdrops clothing the steep banks below the renovated Eagle House, snowdrops, many of them fat doubles, thick on the grassy bank that leads up to the viewpoint above the maze, snowdrops down by the fish pond and the square, rather dark plunge pool where surely only the most muscular of Victorians would have wanted to plunge. A bonus at Painswick was the best bank of winter-flowering cyclamen I've ever seen, pink and magenta Cyclamen coum seeding itself through the grass with an abandon I could only envy.

In terms of garden design, Rococo came and went rather fast: in for 40 years during the first half of the 18th century and then out. Painswick is one of the few places left where you can catch its spirit, light-hearted, frivolous, fun, made for pleasure. Perhaps there was some of that once at a place that now seems completely different: Belton House in Lincolnshire. Painswick was made, then abandoned, not overlaid with new schemes, but the garden at Belton, a superb house built in the 1680s by grand owners, was remade many times. It now seems rather formal, an elegant orangery – the best in the country – overlooking sunken Italianate gardens, long views out over a flattish landscape. The land round Painswick is cut into steep valleys. The feeling of secrecy you get there can't easily be recreated in Lincolnshire.

But if you walk away from Belton House, down through the long formal enfilade of clipped yews, green and gold, you come to an area that's quite different in feeling, carefully informal, craftily planted with shaggy blocks of old box trees. You find a stream, a cascade. And masses of snowdrops and aconites, spreading right back to the boundary of the garden, climbing up the slope to the old ice house and pulling you on towards the big boating pond at the end of the grounds.

This isn't a garden for snowdrop scalp hunters. There are just four different kinds – the common Galanthus nivalis, single and double, grey-leaved G. elwesii and G. plicatus. That suits me. I've always preferred snowdrops en masse, rather than loitering palely on their own with labels stuck like tombstones beside their solitary stems. In the kind of setting they have at Belton, they are particularly magnificent, spread under red-twigged limes and given an entirely appropriate backdrop of ivy, box and yew. In fact the garden is an object lesson in the importance of evergreens. Even in the smallest space, you need landmarks, big lumps of evergreen stuff to define the space and leave you with something better to look at than the mess of weatherbeaten, rotting foliage left behind by the flowers you so loved last summer. Meanwhile, get out this weekend and feast on snowdrops. It may be your last chance.

Painswick Rococo Garden, Painswick, Glos (01452 813204; www.rococogarden.co.uk), open daily (11am-5pm), admission £5.50. The garden at Belton House, nr Grantham, Lincs (01476 566116; www.nationaltrust.org.uk), open at weekends(12-4pm) until 24 Feb, admission £7.50