Hi all, I was fortunate to be able to travel to Melbourne earlier this week to attend the Alpine Garden Society , Victorian Group 2003 lecture. During registration the plant trade table was a very popular area. The speakers were Mat Murray who is a Senior Horticulturalist , Rock Garden, Mount Tomah annex, Sydney Botanical Gardens and Tony Hall , Manager of the Alpine Unit at Kew Gardens. Mat spoke of his trip to the Atlas Mountains in Morocco . This is a harsh environment where the summers are very hot and dry by day but very cold overnight. He was looking for plants which may suit the Mount Tomah Rock Garden which gets similarly hot and dry in summer. This is the home of garden favourite Narcissus bulbocodium but surprisingly Mat found that it often grew in niches where some moisture was retained and has subsequently found in culture that it flowers better in Sydney after some moisture during summer dormancy. The slides of the alpine landscapes were amazing and Mat's snippets of Moroccan culture made a very entertaining presentation. Tony presented an A to Z of rare bulbous plants he has cultivated at Kew. We saw about 120 rare species of which about one quarter were of his favourite genus Iris , especially the Junos. I have much enjoyed an article by Tony on Juno cultivation, in the AGS special bulb issue in 1998, so to hear more of these amazing bulbs was the driving force for me to cross Bass Straight. Most of the bulbs he mentioned were grown in the Alpine House at Kew to protect them from the extremes of environment especially excess moisture. Some of the taxa he showed us represented the only known representatives in cultivation and sadly one or two of these have been lost to cultivation. There were too many rarities to mention them all but I must mention a few which have remained in my memory. My favourites included Lilium catesbaei (SE USA), Trillidium govanianum ( W Himalayas) , natural hybrid Colchicum kesselringii x luteum (Tadjikistan - kicking myself I didn't order it from the last Archibald list) , Galanthus trojanus (NW Turkey) , Crocus moabiticus (Jordon - an RIP plant), the Juno Iris - I could list 20 or so, Stenomesson aurantiaca (Ecuador, Peru ), Roscoea purpurea "Red Gurkha (Nepal) ,Amorphophallus kiusianus ( Japan , Taiwan , SE China - a hardy one ) and the newly described Biarum ditschianum (SW Turkey - just a hairy spadix appendix poking out of the ground.) Tony was a very entertaining and humerous speaker . Some of his descriptions of the smell of plants were very funny - "wet doggy " was a common one , others are perhaps best not mentioned , although Tony was able to get away with them. Around 200 people thoroughly enjoyed this evening which was rounded off by a delicious selection of edible goodies from Patterson's Cakes workplace of Pastrycook and legendary bulb grower Otto Fauser. Cheers, Rob in Tasmania