I can't offer an opinion on the plant sold in commerce as Colchicum cilicicum except to say that the one time I bought it, it looked exactly like C. x byzantinum and bloomed at the same time, so I concluded it was actually C. x byzantinum. I noticed that the first two photos in the series you linked to did not appear to be tessellated and then the others were, as you remarked, extremely tessellated, and yet they were all labeled C. cilicicum. But could you tell me more about this website? Is it considered the authority on nomenclature for Colchicum? I have what was sold to me as C. giganteum, which I read on this site is a synonym for C. speciosum. I have purchased C. speciosum numerous times without every feeling confident I had gotten the real thing, but I grow C. speciosum 'Album' and it doesn't have the same flower shape as C. giganteum. Similarly, I have never grown C. bivonae, but I have grown hybrids that are supposed to have C. bivonae as one of their parents, and now I see C. bivonae is a synonym for C. cilicicum! And sadly neither this website nor the European Flora describes named cultivars at all. When it comes to colchicums, I despair of ever being certain of anything. On Mon, Sep 21, 2015 at 10:24 AM, Jim McKenney <jamesamckenney@verizon.net> wrote: > Is the plant widely sold in commerce as Colchicum cilicicum the real > thing? > Take a look at the images on the site for which a link is given below. > They show a much more clearly tessellated flower with a different shape. In > fact, the flowers shown on this site are about as tessellated as any > colchicum I've seen. These photos were taken at Kew. Look here: > http://colchicaceae.e-monocot.org/taxonomy/term/… > > If anyone knows of a source for these plants, please speak up! > > Jim McKenneyMontgomery County, Maryland, USA, USDA zone 7, where today's > high temperature will be about twenty-five degrees cooler than we have > experienced recently. > > > > _______________________________________________ > pbs mailing list > pbs@lists.ibiblio.org > http://pacificbulbsociety.org/list.php > http://pacificbulbsociety.org/pbswiki/ -- Kathy Purdy 2015 Winner of the Garden Writers Association Silver Award of Achievement for Blog Writing http://www.coldclimategardening.com/