Bessie My unscientific take is that the plant will sprout from the most terminal surviving nodes. If stems remain and survive the winter, the nodes there are among the first to sprout. If you remove the stems, or remove the tuber and some crown from the clump, then the next furthest nodes will sprout i.e. the nodes on the crown which I guess are the last chance nodes as there is nothing below them. Seems like perennials are often pruned with this in mind, to get the new growth from the crown vs. the growth that shows up on last year's stems.
