PBS Forum

My container plants are on the patio floor and wrapped up under lightweight "mover's quilts." The bulb house denizens are on their own at about 20 F; many are not emerged yet, and most have survived it before. My suburb at the south edge of Portland, Oregon missed the threatened freezing rain so far; ground is covered in graupel, which is dangerous to walk or drive on but doesn't cling to plants. My new high-efficiency furnace stopped working when its condensate drain tube froze in an unthawable place, but I have a secondary furnace in the wing of the house with this nice warm office, and an environmentally offensive wood-burning fireplace elsewhere. Also a pot of cabbage borscht big enough for a soup kitchen.

Going back to the mention of semi-underground greenhouses, yesterday my exploration of ancient AGS journals turned up an article on how one English gardener in 1941 dug a bomb shelter in his back garden, and was inspired to use the angled sandbags-on-metal cover to add a few rocks and a lot of plants to create what might be called an artificial moraine. Nothing can stop a mad gardener -- not even the Blitz.

Thanks for the encouraging replies. Now I have to test a few articles (using e.g. genus+author) against Google to make sure I'm not just duplicating the effort of massive search engines.

It's interesting that Robin Hansen lives nearly 200 miles south of me, and closer to the ocean, but temperatures where I live are quite a bit warmer the past week or so. Just another example of why USDA climate zones (the 1 to 10 ratings) don't apply to the far western states.

I'm sorting a huge collection of alpine/rock gardening journals going back as far as the late 1930s. I can't bring myself to throw them in the recycling bin; they've been through too many great gardeners' libraries. Nowadays, the North American Rock Garden Society, the Alpine Garden Society, and the Scottish Rock Garden Club have made their back volumes available in digital form. This would include indexes. However, I wonder if it would be useful for me to make a bibliography (not annotated), by genera, of useful geophyte articles from these journals, so enthusiasts could go quickly to the online pages. It would be a winter project (we all need them), and I'd learn plenty. What do you think? I'm a very experienced bibliographer -- worked on Oxford UP's online reference bibliographies for years.

Regarding cleaning greenhouse roofs: I just had a window-washing company clean the polycarbonate roof of my bulb house, which gets dirty from tree pollen. I think it's important in my cloudy winter climate to get as much light as possible on my winter-flowering geophytes. Especially in more northerly latitudes, plants can fail to grow "in character" and end up stretched and floppy. Incidentally, the discussion of the winter solstice reminded me of this season when I lived in Fairbanks, Alaska, and every morning the public radio station gave out the day's length. It was a great day when it changed from "seven minutes less than yesterday" to a little increase. My plants then were under artificial light, mostly in my well-heated office and not in the freezing cabin.

Fritz Kummert's book "Pflanzen fur das Alpinenhaus" (apologies for omitting umlauts; published by Ulmer) has a very good chapter on the construction of a semi-subterranean alpine house (in Austria), with detailed drawings. It's mostly a plant encyclopedia, with plenty of geophytes discussed. The design of the alpine house is intended to facilitate warming in winter and (important for alpines) cooling in summer -- all or mostly passive. It would have to be where the water table is low enough, though, or on a slope with drains provided.

I've been growing geophytes for about 35 years now without heating the frames or roofed, open-sided shelter I now use. I've found that simply covering marginally hardy plants in growth during severe cold periods (below 20 F here) increases survival. Microfoam row cover is available to the nursery industry here, but lately I use the thin quilts used by furniture movers; the latter are available at low cost from places that sell cheap hardware, such as Harbor Freight. I set my vulnerable container plants on the patio floor and tuck the quilts around the flats. Sometimes I protect marginal crocuses in growth just by putting a drinking glass upside-down over them. All the plants in the bulb house are plunged in sand. I haven't experimented properly, but I suspect that one can gain an extra 5 degrees F by these simple expedients. This might not help with obligatorily frost-free, actual tropical species, though.

Around here, the lottery is known as "the stupidity tax."

While living in a cabin near Fairbanks, Alaska, I got a catalog from a Dutch bulb company suggesting that bulbs could be "forced." I bought some, potted them, and put them under my bed to chill. At times they froze solid: no temperature control in that place. Nevertheless, they grew and flowered (under a grow-light), and I brought them to my university office to delight and amaze all. I especially remember the fragrance of Iris reticulata. That was when I started on the long road to my love of these plants.

As far as I know, there is no pink form of Rhodophiala bagnoldii, which has bright yellow flowers. However, in the same general area one finds Rhodophiala ananuca, which comes in various shades from white to peach and soft pink. Both these species grow in deep sand near the Pacific shoreline. I tracked down #9527 in their 2001 seedlist and it does say "apparently the same as R. bagnoldii in all except colour which is a lovely variable pale milky pink all the way down to white. The site is described only as "somewhat inland," well, R. ananuca is best seen on the inland side of a big stabilized dune formation and a narrow valley with a stream in rain years. As I have seen them, R. bagnoldii has green leaves at flowering, while R. ananuca's leaves are withered at flowering.

I just noticed that NARGS has reopened, in a sense, their bookstore, being run by a volunteer who is selling off (at very low prices) books that were in someone's "storage shed" (I think I know who--and some of those were in my basement, before I moved to a house without a basement). I wrote to ask if he would take donations but haven't heard back.

I'm busy packeting seeds for the SX. One donor offers many different species in a few South African genera. It made me wonder how likely it is that coming from such a large collection, the seed lots will produce hybrids. I know my Narcissus have hybridized over the  years. I don't grow South African bulbs, since I have no heated facility. If you've grown SX seeds, have you seen many likely hybrids among the resulting plants?

Can you tell us the typical size of the tepals of Colchicum multiflorum? The photo immediately reminded me of one I have under the name C. laetum.

Now that so many journals are available online, libraries don't like to keep them on the shelves. I wish I could place all the rock garden journals (NARGS, SRGC, AGS, etc.) with someone who will profit from them. I'm reading through them again and it's wonderful to discover information that is useful to me right now. Some years ago I put together, for NARGS, a book called "Rock garden plants of North America," which includes articles from about 50 years of their journal; it's out of print now but I think it took many people on enjoyable plant hikes. The two other Timber Press volumes I edited for NARGS contain purpose-written chapters.