Snowdrop Walks
Cambo Gardens is open 7 days a week from 10am to explore our gardens and woodlands. The Scottish Snowdrop festival runs from 27 January – 12 March. Visitors can enjoy our winter garden and specialist snowdrop collection and the swathes of naturalised snowdrops in our woodland walk to the sea.
Tickets can be booked in advance for specific days via the online calendar on the ‘What’s on’ page. Do also see the What’s On page for related tours and activities taking place as part of the Scottish Snowdrop Festival.
The National Snowdrop collection
Cambo is world famous for snowdrops and home to the Plant Heritage national collection of snowdrops, with over 200 varieties alongside the thousands of nivalis at home in the Cambo woodlands.
Cambo also houses a herbarium collection containing key species from our extensive snowdrop collection. Appointments can be made to view the archive outwith snowdrop season.
There have been snowdrops at Cambo for many years, but it was Lady Magdalen Erskine, an avid gardener, who really encouraged their proliferation from the 1930’s. As snowdrops require thinning-out and redistributing every three to four years, Magdalen and her eight children spent hours each year digging, dividing and replanting the snowdrops in the 70 acres of woodland.
In 1986, avid galanthophile Lady Catherine Erskine, having read articles advocating planting snowdrops “in the green” in spring-time rather than the traditional dried bulbs in the autumn, launched her now renowned mail-order snowdrop business.
Over the years, Catherine’s own collection of specialist snowdrops has grown steadily and is now viewed as the national collection, with over 200 varieties growing in our gardens. We also offer a very limited number of these for sale online, depending on their availability.
