Dear All, My theme for today are three plants that have had negative press. I recently found my husband had taken a picture of our rare fringed corn lily, Veratrum fimbriatum. I've been admiring the leaves as they emerge lately on my hikes. They really are impressive. This plant flowers in late summer and at that time can be a bit scruffy after all kinds of insects have had a chance to eat it and without rain for months everything can be dusty. Still I was rather surprised to read that this species was unattractive in Bulbs of North America. I'm not sure I'd call it beautiful, but the flowers are very intricate and certainly interesting. Since it is one of the geophytes that grows where I live and rare, we consider it special although I'd never think to grow it since it gets so big and needs a very wet place which my garden isn't in summer. I asked all the people in my hiking group when we stopped to look at it this week where it has emerged in very wet sag ponds and the consensus was that the leaves were very attractive at least in the early months. I didn't have a camera with me so these were last year's pictures. http://pacificbulbsociety.org/pbswiki/index.php/… Blooming recently for me was Lachenalia bachmanii. Graham Duncan describes it as not particularly attractive, but I like it. Some of the "must have" Lachenalias he lists don't always appeal to me. Obviously what looks good to one person may not to others. http://pacificbulbsociety.org/pbswiki/index.php/… The third plant deserves its bad reputation as an invasive aggressive weed. It is Nothoscordum gracile. I saw it all over the Huntington Garden in Southern California where they will probably never get rid of it. After David Fenwick praised Tulbaghias I decided to grow some from seed and have gotten seed of three different species from NARGS seed exchanges that all turned out to be this pest instead. It is very disheartening. The latest was supposed to be Tulbaghia capensis which is brown to purple and green with an orange corona. You wouldn't think it could be confused with a white flower. But in my search to confirm my suspicion I found that pictures of Nothoscordum gracile are hard to find. The pictures on the web are not very good and the best one I could find, the one below, I think is of something else. http://ortobotanicoportici.unina.it/Piante/… There ought to be a section in generic bulb books that shows pictures of some of the ones to avoid or they should be pictured along with all the other bulbs so people could confirm that the one they have is not desirable. So before I toss this new batch as I have done the others in the past, I have added some photographs to the wiki. When it finally opens, the flowers are kind of attractive and nicely fragrant, but a lot of the time the flowers are closed. It certainly has been known by a lot of different names so I added all the synonyms on the wiki. Maybe I'll get a shot of the bulblets around the mother bulb if I find time as it and the soil goes in the trash. http://pacificbulbsociety.org/pbswiki/index.php/… Mary Sue