Lee wrote: >>So what should one do (in So. Calif.) if he is tempted beyond the ability to resist into purchasing them in mid-spring at the Rancho Santa Ana Botanical Garden (RSABG) plant sale? I cannot get them to survive in their pots until the autumn. I suspect there's a difference between planting them out from pots and digging them up to transplant them. There's much less disruption of their roots if you're planting out from a pot. I went through a several-year period when I was wildly enthusiastic about PCIs and bought them mail order in large quantities. When you buy via mail order, the plants are shipped to you in the autumn bare root, and it's VERY difficult to get them established. Some cultivars do fine, but many of them either do not establish at all, or last only a couple of years before dying out. The usual rule of plant perversity applied: the more beautiful the cultivar, the faster it died. I asked a very experienced PCI breeder about this once, and he said he had seen the same phenomenon. He suspected the problem was that many of the hybrids are bred in Santa Cruz, which has just about the most benign climate on the planet for PCIs. The plants bred there don't get naturally selected for ruggedness, in his opinion. Mike San Jose, CA