It’s the time of year when snowflakes are falling and snowdrops are rising as winter and spring begin their annual argument.

Snowdrops are aptly named for several reasons. The ‘drop’ part may come from their resemblance to drop earrings, reflecting the way their flowers hang from the stem. The ‘snow’ part is a bit more straightforward.

An 18th-century poet called Thomas Tickell referred to them as ‘vegetable snow’, and when you come across a dense carpet of them in the woods they can look just like a patch of wintry ground.

But timing has as much to do with the name as the whiteness of their petals. As one of the first flowers of the year they quite often emerge when there is snow on the ground. This leads to one of their nicknames, snow-piercers, an English version of the name used in France, where they are called perce-neige.

It’s no mean feat to tunnel your way up through the icy soil in the depths of winter and these tough little plants have specially adapted leaves with hardened tips that allow them to break through the frozen ground. To help them survive once they emerge into the cold air, their sap contains proteins that act as a kind of antifreeze to stop ice crystals forming.

On very cold mornings, clumps of snowdrops can look a bit sad, flopping down as the water inside the plant stops moving, but once temperatures rise and the sap can start flowing, they soon perk up again. There is some debate as to the origin of snowdrops in Britain.

It may be that they are native to some parts of the country, particularly the south west, but most of the flowers we see have escaped from gardens and naturalised themselves in the countryside. Many of them have also escaped from churchyards where they were planted for Candlemas.

The whiteness of the flowers made them an ideal symbol of the purification of Mary in the Bible. which this feast celebrates. A slightly less holy purpose saw them being planted in lines to help mark the way to the outside loo during the darker months! One clue to snowdrops having been introduced from abroad is that almost all of them reproduce by division of the bulbs, rather than by seed. This is partly due to the cultivated varieties being sterile, and partly because February isn’t a popular time with the insects who pollinate most plants. Whatever their origins, snowdrops remain one of the brightest signs of the coming spring, so try to get out for a walk and enjoy them.