Snowdrop Garden

I mentioned in a previous post that I really want to have a snowdrop garden. Today was the perfect day for transplanting a few hundred more toward that goal. Clumps that have gotten a bit crowded can be dug up and divided into smaller clumps and spread around. Here's a clump that was planted three years ago around this time of year:

By now it will have 30-40 bulbs, and if you look closely you can see where the flowers were, there's a seed pod starting to form. Here's a close-up of it:

Snowdrops spread both sexually and asexually. This seed pod will eventually split open and drop its seeds, but that process goes quite slowly. Dividing goes a lot more quickly, so today I dug up around 30 large clumps and spread them around a large area in the Wall Garden, where I'm hoping a couple years from now to see a sea of snowdrops and hellebores.

Today was a perfect day for it, because it had rained yesterday, which meant everyone was well hydrated. I like the new clumps to have quite a few bulbs in them, and based upon the success of previous years, I don't take too much care planting them. I divide and scatter them, then come along after with a hori hori knife and stick them in the ground with no additional treatment.

The very first ones I planted were in a line, which looks decidedly weird. Those have long since been scattered to the wind, and now I take care to give them a haphazard placement.