An Iowa Garden

Things I never knew: how flower bulbs divide (or, what the heck is a Fibonacci sequence?). We all wish to have, of course, drifts of flowering bulbs in the spring, but seldom reach that goal. Snowdrop drifts are particularly elusive... to start with, their bulbs are especially sensitive to being out of the ground for long, so only a percentage of purchased bulbs newly planted will ever come back in the spring. Of course, books always tell us to get our snowdrops "in the green"; that is, to obtain a clump of growing snowdrops right after they bloom. Ha! You would sooner find a browsing camel in Iowa than a neighbor looking to offload a few clumps of spare snowdrops. There is only one tiny specialty nursery in this country, in New England, that I know sells snowdrops in the green, and they are pricy cultivars. The second hinderance to getting large drifts of snowdrops is that they are such tiny things, that it just takes a while to make much of an impression; a five year old clump of snowdrops could easily be covered by a coffee cup. It is usually stated that Galanthus nivalis (the lesser, or European, snowdrop) multiplies much more readily than G. elwesii (the greater, or Byzantian, snowdrop) but for unfathomable reasons, in my garden, the opposite seems to be true. With all flower bulbs in the garden, it always seems as if they just sort of sit there for a couple of years, and then when you turn your back on them, suddenly they are flopping all over and need dividing (a job that gets done about as often as winning the lottery around here). The explanation for this seeming peculiarity in bulb division, which I found by reading an article by Dr. Frank Greer of Madison Wisconsin, a bulboholic, and mainstay of the Wisconsin Hardy Plant Society, is that flower bulbs divide in a Fibonacci sequence. Now, Fibonacci was a twelfth century mathematician, who proposed the mathematical sequence that bears his name (he used multiplying rabbits as his example, but we're talking bulbs here). The Fibonacci sequence is: 1-2-3-5-8-13... where every number is the sum of its two predecessors. Thus, after the first year a flower bulb has a bulb and an immature bulblet. In the third year, you have two bulbs with one bulblet, in the fourth year, three bulbs and two bulblets, then five bulbs with three bulblets, then eight bulbs and five bulblets, then it's time to get out the shovel. I think I'll go out and count my snowdrops.