Winterthur Garden Blog

This last weekend we offered a guided walk through the March Bank to enjoy the snowdrops, winter aconite, snowflake, and crocuses. One of the questions that comes up often, but that I am always a little hesitant to answer, is “how many bulbs are there in the March Bank?” I always say millions, with my fingers crossed behind my back because after all, I have not counted them.

I decided to answer this nagging doubt of mine. Using Google Earth I plotted the area of the March Bank, basically following the boundaries of the area we have used for the March Bank restoration, but slightly smaller. I drew a line from Scroll Garden up to the 1750 house, then down to Magnolia Bend, but I excluded the Glade. The area enclosed by this measurement is 6.9 acres or 300,564 square feet.

Looking at a square foot of ground in the March Bank I chose a very conservative estimate of 10 bulbs per square foot. This is very conservative – some square feet clearly have 40-50 bulbs but then again there are some areas with almost no bulbs, and of course there are paths and watercourses devoid of bulbs. Ten is probably a fair guess.

Multiply 300,564 by 10 bulbs/square foot (notice how ‘10’ makes my math nice and easy) and you get 3,005,640 bulbs. Even if my assumptions are off by half, we would still have more than a million bulbs. I would propose that saying the March Bank has ‘millions of bulbs’ is well within the margin of error.

I would like to thank the 93 visitors who came on the walk on Saturday as well as our own staff members Tom and Amy. It was a beautiful day to enjoy the March Bank and to contemplate millions of bulbs.