Snowdrops 



This garden is not very well suited to Snowdrops: 

 they do not colonise or settle down and require no further 

 treatment as in cooler soils, but I take so much interest 

 in the various forms and seedling varieties that I have 

 diligently collected all I can get, and labour earnestly 

 to keep them here. Most of them require frequent 

 division and replanting, and I believe in doing this just 

 as they are going out of flower, and if the roots are 

 not broken in lifting but carefully spread out in their 

 new soil, they seem to gather up nourishment for the 

 newly-forming bulb without a check. The bulb of a 

 Snowdrop is well worth examining. If dug up and 

 well washed at flowering time, you will find it consists 

 of first a very thin brown skin, easily broken and rubbed 

 off, leaving a shining, white surface below, which is the 

 outside of a thick, fleshy wrapping enclosing the whole 

 bulb, and having a small round opening at the top, out 

 of which the shoot of the present year has grown. By 

 carefully slitting one side of this white wrapper you 

 can peel it off, and will see that it is about the same 

 thickness throughout, and has an inner membranous 

 lining that is only attached to it at the top and base. 

 What remains of the bulb appears wrapped in a second 

 similar fleshy covering, but by slitting and removing 

 this you will find that its inner surface is three times 

 as thick on one side of the bulb as on the other, and 

 the thicker side is fluted with nine or more ridges, which 

 remind one of those on the corrugated cardboard so 

 useful for packing fragile objects (and even plants for 

 the post when one cannot find a long and narrow box 



