Picture Profile 2416: Galanthus “Jacquenetta”.

Artist Code 2416. Galanthus “Jacquenetta”. Water colour on Aquarelle Arches 100% cotton paper 140lb. 10″ x 14″. Completed 28th September 2024

This is the final snowdrop—number thirteen in a series of paintings of snowdrops for the Iceni Botanical Artists’ Fullers Mill Project (2022–24), most with a special link to East Anglia. All the project snowdrops are situated in Fullers Mill Garden, West Stow, Suffolk.

FLOWERS FEBRUARY, MARCH, APRIL

A bold Greatorex hybrid with large, tight, double flowers, often with a green outer mark giving an overall impression of greenness. It grows at Fullers Mill around a large hydrangea! Bulbs are planted in small clumps about 8cm deep in a humus rich soil in part shade. Divide the clumps after flowering.

This is a Hybrid mix of Galanthus plicatus and Galanthus nivalis ‘Flore Pleno’. It grows to a height of between 10cm and 25cm. It has dark green markings which run along the length of the many inner segments. The large and rounded outer segments sometimes also have green markings at their tips. Named after a character (Jaquenetta) in Shakespeare’s “Love Labour’s Lost” but the snowdrop is spelt with a ‘c’: “Jacquenetta”.

Field studies were made from the plants in situ at Fullers Mill between January 2022 and March 2024. Very few plants were available. This painting is an accumulation of three years’ work and photographs. In 2024, all the flower heads were eaten by muntjac before my field trip, so all I was left with were the flower stems and small leaves!

In January 2022, the Iceni Botanical Artists, IBA (of which I am a member, and Chair from November 2021–), decided that their next botanical project would be to paint a year of the flora and fauna in Fullers Mill Garden, West Stow, Suffolk, designed and planted by Bernard Tickner and his wife, Bess. It was decided that it should be a two-year project and completion of all artworks was set for 1st January 2024.

In March 2022, Annie Delbridge, then head gardener (with permission from the Charity Perennial who now look after the garden) supplied the IBA with a list of plants which grow in the garden and the animals, birds, insects, fish etc., which live in or visit the garden. Iceni Artists have been free to choose which plants, vistas and fauna they would like to depict and it is hoped that we will hold an exhibition of all the artworks, as well as publishing a book with a selection of paintings.

My main task for the project was to paint these 13 snowdrops – some rare, some not so, and others which are different, and most with a connection to East Anglia (although since completing them, and because it is now so widespread, Galanthus “Paradise Giant” will not be included in the East Anglian connection, so will be discarded for the IBA Project book :-().