Perhaps the rest of you are finding this tilting between Roger and me tiresome. Let me see if I can enliven things a bit and steer the thread into a totally different direction. Evidently Roger and I are both big on crocus. These disagreements seem to come with the territory. Earlier this evening I was wondering what Linnaeus might think of our modern genus Crocus. I began fantasizing about what it might be like if Linnaeus were to come back to life during the spring crocus season and take a walk around the garden with someone who knew crocuses, but not their history. For the sake of my story, let that someone be someone who has been following our postings about Crocus flavus and Crocus 'Dutch Yellow'. Again, for the sake of my story, Linnaeus will arrive when a big spread of Crocus 'Dutch Yellow' is in bloom. He will also arrive with his faculties fully intact in their 1753 version. Since it isn't every day that Linnaeus visits the garden, our gardener will be careful to let him do most of the talking. But that doesn't mean that our gardener can't lead the witness a bit - as in, lead Linnaeus right over to that grand patch of flowering Crocus 'Dutch Yellow'. Our gardener waits there while the great man admires the crocuses. What our gardener is waiting for is for Linnaeus to officially pronounce the identity of those crocuses. Will he call them Crocus flavus or will he recognize them as 'Dutch Yellow'? Our gardener knows that 'Dutch Yellow' existed in the eighteenth century, maybe even in the seventeenth. The name might have been different, but it was there. Our impatient gardener finally asks the great man "Which species of crocus is this?" And Linnaeus replies, in surprisingly good English, that they are Crocus sativus. At this, our gardener is perplexed. He's trying to be very polite here: after all, Linnaeus has been asleep for about two and a half centuries. Give him a chance to wake up. Maybe it's the jet lag - or just the sheer astonishment of having been on a jet. Linnaeus, for his part, notices the look of surprise on the face of the gardener. A kindly man, he volunteers "Oh, you want me to be very precise, don't you? You have been reading my book, Species Plantarum, haven't you? In that case, you know that those are Crocus sativus var β vernus". Our gardener is now flummoxed: surely those two and a half centuries have addled the mind of the father of nomenclature. Is he color blind? Can't he see that those are yellow crocuses, not purple crocuses? And doesn't he know that Crocus sativus blooms in the fall, and not in the spring? And color blind or not, Crocus sativus and Crocus vernus don't look at all alike anyway! Darn, thinks the gardener, how do they expect me to get it right when the so-called experts can't get it right? At that, our gardener, thoroughly disgusted, pulls out his Rubus fruticosus and arranges for someone to pick up old Linnaeus and take him back wherever he came from. ****************** So what is this all about? To begin with, all of the pronouncements of our Linnaeus redivivus are correct - or at least they were correct in 1753. When Linnaeus established the genus Crocus, it had but one species which he named sativus. The word sativus means "cultivated". His choice of the name sativus might have been a reflection of his belief that all of the crocuses he knew (evidently learned under the mentorship of Phillip Miller of the Chelsea Physic Garden) were garden crocuses. His Crocus sativus var β vernus included all spring blooming species of Crocus regardless of color or other distinction. One species - that was it. Things have changed a bit, haven't they? Incidentally, that one species included a plant now placed in the genus Romulea. In a very broad sense, Romulea is to Crocus as polyanthus primrose is to acaulis primrose. There are four Romulea in the garden here, but that's another story. Jim McKenney jimmckenney@jimmckenney.com Montgomery County, Maryland, USA, USDA zone 7, where two of those four Romulea are poking up. My Virtual Maryland Garden http://www.jimmckenney.com/ Webmaster Potomac Valley Chapter, NARGS Editor PVC Bulletin http://www.pvcnargs.org/ Webmaster Potomac Lily Society http://www.potomaclilysociety.org/