Dear Brent, Joe, and all, Thanks Joe for alerting us to the article in Nature and Brent for sharing the information about your experience with Babiana ringens. If I recall, when Babiana was the topic of the week in April the general consensus was that it was not hardy and attempts to grow it in colder climates had not been successful. Babiana ringens is a coastal species so you would expect that it would be less hardy than some of the species growing at higher elevations that would experience colder temperatures on a regular basis. Your story for me illustrates a couple of points. One is that where you plant is important as is the planting medium. Plants in the ground are much more likely to sustain cold temperatures than those in pots. Babianas tend to relocate deep in the ground where the corms would have some protection from the elements. And because many of the species produce multiple cormlets around the main corm, even if a plant was wiped out because of the cold, some of the cormlets could remain and in later years plants you thought you had lost could reappear. When we had an unusually cold December (I think it was 2000) many of my South African bulbs in a raised bed turned to mush. Some put out new leaves the very same year. Others I thought I had lost returned in subsequent years. The propensity to produce cormlets also protects species from predation. One assumes that the Baboons for which this species is named would miss some of the smaller cormlets. On African Hill at the UC Botanical Garden, Berkeley, California, I understand the gophers in the past redistributed and relocated some of the Babiana cormlets. That and all those new cormlets create quite a display in spring as illustrated by Liz Waterman's photo on the wiki. http://pacificbulbsociety.org/pbswiki/files/… Mary Sue
