Dear All, Someone asked for a topic on bulbs that survived frozen ground. A number of you have been reporting spring is at last coming although I saw on the weather channel that snow has still been coming too. But now seems like a good week for this topic when spring is officially here although it has been looking like spring in California for months. Judy Glattstein is writing a book on naturalistic gardening with bulbs and has kindly provided us with an introduction for this topic below. Mary Sue Ittner TOW Coordinator Coping with Cold In my early married days we had a refrigerator with delusions - it wanted to be a freezer. You can imagine what this did to vegetables, including onions. They would thaw to a soft and odiferous mass. Leaving aside the refrigerator, how is it that geophytes survive our New Jersey winters? In the 7 years we've lived here it is not uncommon for winter temperatures to descend to single digits Fahrenheit, or even sub-zero. It can stay below freezing, night and day, for a week or more. It can do this with no insulating cover of snow. Clearly, Mother nature knows something kitchen equipment does not. It must have something to do with roots. Soil type does have a role to play. Here in New Jersey I have clay. It is not as bad as some types of clay but it does stay damp and cold. My previous garden, in Connecticut, had that lovely mythical gardener's grail - high organic loamy soil, moist yet well-drained. Amaryllis belladonna was reliably hardy and flowered every year. Then there is the separate issue of geophytes in growth in cold weather. I've seen Galanthus frozen so solid that the stems snap when I pick a few to bring indoors. Those remaining outside do thaw and revive when the temperatures moderate. Fritillaria imperialis slumps to the ground in a frost, then hoists itself back up with the mid-morning thaw. What is the secret of their vegetative anti-freeze? Muscari don't mind: they cheerfully send leaves up every autumn to freeze every winter. Arum italicum 'Pictum' and A. 'Chamaeleon' are winter-proof. Lycoris squamigera does well for me, because (an assumption on my part) it waits until spring to send up foliage. L. radiata lingers, diminishes, and dies after a few years. Again, my assumption is that the autumn foliage, killed by the winter freeze, does have a large impact. Questions, comments, observations? Judy Glattstein