Welcome February with Cicely Mary Barker: the Fair Maids of February and the Snowdrop Fairy

"Cicely would draw the flowers and the fairies and then write poetry about them."

The English illustrator Cicely Mary Barker is remembered for depicting fairies and flowers.

In Cicely's fabulous fantasy world, every flower was granted its particular fairy to protect it from harm.

For winter, Cicely created fairies and poems for these plants: Snowdrop, Groundsel, Dead Nettle, Shepherd's Purse Spindle Berry Old Man's Beard, Yew, Lords-and-Ladies, Holly, Blackthorne, Pine Tree, Box Tree, Rush Grass And Cotton Grass, The Plane Tree, Burdock, Winter Jasmine, The Hazel-Catkin, Totter Grass, Winter Aconite, And The Christmas Tree.

Cicely would draw the flowers and the fairies and then write poetry about them.

Cicely painted a flower fairy for the Fair Maids of February, aka the Snowdrops, and she christened it the Snowdrop Fairy.

Cicely loved wildflowers, but she didn't believe in fairies.

In the foreword to Flower Fairies of the Wayside, she wrote:

"I have drawn all the plants and flowers carefully, from real ones, but I have never seen a fairy..."

There’s a lovely website called Flower Fairies, which has organized Cicely’s fairies by season.

Here’s Cicely's poem about Snowdrops to accompany the Snowdrop Fairy.

Deep sleeps the Winter,
Cold, wet, and grey;
Surely all the world is dead;
Spring is far away.

Wait! the world shall waken;
It is not dead, for lo,
The Fair Maids of February
Stand in the snow!