Snowdrop

I saw my first snowdrop of the year today!

The snowdrop is a reminder of spring.

A flower that first in this sweet garden smiled, / To virgins sacred, and the Snow-drop styled.

Tufts of primroses grew under the still leafless trees; the hepatica had succeeded the snowdrop.

White Ladies did not mean snowdrops, by their pretty old English name, ghosts in white cere-clothes, or belles in white tarlatan.

[I]t was considered unlucky to decorate a room with cut snowdrops. The name death's flower relates to an old belief that a solitary snowdrop indicates impending death, with suggestions that it was inauspicious to bring snowdrops indoors.

MS: There was a lot of snowdropping in those days? / SL: Oh, I've never actually stooped to snowdropping; I used to go into shops. Boosting, man, boosting. But you learn how to survive.

‘Snowdropping’ is the business of some poor sods who, often from laundry drying on a clothes line, pinch items of ladies’ underwear, take them away and sniff them.

It'll be like snowdropping clothes from a clothesline. We'll snowdrop a baby.

For quotations using this term, see Citations:Snowdrop.