PBS Forum

Acis valentina grows well in the open garden here in western Oregon, and is coming into flower now. I have Prospero obtusifolia under its old name of Scilla o., and am glad to know where it has now been placed. I grew another "Scilla" under the species name intermedia, and it looks very like obtusifolia and flowers in autumn too. It's interesting that North Africa has produced A. valentina, a fall bloomer, and A. tingitana, a very similar plant that flowers in spring.

I did my earlier give-away individually as Martin suggests, but not everyone would be willing to do the packing and posting, and sending books internationally can be very expensive (some of the people reimbursed me for postage). If there were enough interest, it might be better to centralize an LX and run it like a bookstore, with the coordinator paid a percentage of the prices, which should be kept very low. Some out-of-print plant books now sell for more than most of us can afford; check out Brian Mathew's "Crocus," which I'm glad I bought at publication time.

There comes a time when many of us realize we have shelves of botanical and horticultural books and journals that we no longer use. I just filled 8 shopping bags with journals to give away, and still have AGS and SRGC journals going back to the late 1950s (no, I wasn't a member then!), too technical to appeal to local gardeners. A couple of years ago I offered books to PBS members and got rid of quite a few, but there are more in surplus. Now another PBS member is offering a choice selection, including many excellent bulb books, to our NARGS chapter. Do any of you have any good ideas how to keep these books out of the recycling bins? A PBS LX (literature exchange)?

Lee asked if anyone has lost plants to excessive heat. Of course. When I moved from about 1600 feet/500 m elevation down to about 120 ft above sea level, I could no longer grow the blue meconopsis David mentioned, and many of my prized alpine Ericaceae died. Almost all my bulbs are summer-dormant, so no problems there. On the other hand, as soon as it cools off a bit I'm going to plant a Telopea (Australian Proteaceae), and Zantedeschia rehmannii just flowered in the garden. You have to live with your place a year or two to understand what to plant where, and make microclimates, especially if you need to limit irrigation. And be prepared to lose some of your bets.

Bern asked where would be a good place in the USA for a "plant collection." The answer is that you pick your place, then you choose the plants that will do well there. When I left Alaska I chose western Oregon as a place with moderate seasons and a reliable water supply (though we're now about 65 days since the last rain). I've never heated my bulb collection, though I did cover it with microfoam row-cover sheets during severe cold snaps when I lived at a higher elevation. Now I put vulnerable container plants on the patio floor and cover them with the "mover's quilts" you can buy cheaply at discount hardware stores. These measures would probably bring most greenhouse subjects through the coldest temperatures that might occur in England. However, a severe winter may turn some people away from South African species and toward the more resilient plants of the Mediterranean and the western Americas.

The late "kleptocratic ruler of Angola from 1979 to 2017, Jose Eduardo dos Santos, is survived by a daughter whose name is Welwitschia dos Santos. Was that intended to give her a lifespan of a thousand years?

Regarding high-school students, I find they get bored too easily and can't meet a schedule; also, there are liability insurance constraints about hiring somebody under 18. As for the community college, I have tried that, with no results, despite living in the county with the most nurseries of all US counties. Just 10 hours a week would help immensely, and he or she would not have to speak English, but would have to show up when planned. I'll keep trying.
Jane

After almost 40 years of bulbs in August, I do not love this. Out as early as I can, sifting sand and sorting bulbs until the heat is too much, pulling out the gravestones -- the labels put in ten years ago, when I made this raised bed -- is about 80% depressing. The other 20% is finding very good things still alive, and they are going into plunged pots so I don't risk losing track of them. I have big baskets of Spanish Narcissus and California themids, which I will try to palm off on innocent persons; they're through choking out everything but the Calochortus and Tulipa, which get down below them. My goal is half the "directly planted" half of the bulb house, a space 8x20 feet; the other half, which is mostly free of narcissus and themids, gets done next year if I survive. I just turned 75, and I would hate gardening a lot less if I could hire help. The problem is not the cost, but the fact that reliable, skilled (or teachable) garden assistants do not exist in this area. We have "landscapers" (guys with a pickup and some power tools) and "garden designers" (people who've read some books about it), but not the legendary "gardeners." Thanks for listening....

The narrow leaves and the name "comosum" suggest it's close to Ornithogalum fimbriatum, which is not invasive for me. These short-stemmed "thogs" can be invasive, depending on species, though. I enjoy O. orthophyllum in the bulb lawn, where it seeds mildly and stars the grass attractively in late spring. The various species I grow flower from midwinter (starting with O. lanceolatum) into July (O. ponticum, O. magnum). My gem is O. reverchonii, which is hardy outdoors here despite its coastal origin.

I decided to order a few modern varieties, plant them in pots, and keep the pots far away from my bulb collection (my house is on a large lot). Also, I will dose the pots with a very effective systemic insecticide to prevent infestation by aphids, which are the vectors of viruses. I will use the tulips as indoor decoration once they begin to show color. That will prevent the insecticide from harming bees.

Long ago I was warned not to plant imported commercial tulip bulbs because they were likely to host viruses that could be transferred to my species tulips and lilies, which are likely to be more vulnerable to virus damage. How true is this? It's very tempting to order some Dutch tulip bulbs to grow for temporary color and especially for cut flowers. I don't have a solid-sided greenhouse, so insects (i.e., aphids) could get in among my species collection from the open garden.

I have a small surplus of Tulipa regelii seed this summer and would like to exchange it for seed or bulbs, particularly of the following: western American Erythronium species, Colchicum kesselringii, Iris stenophylla, Fritillaria sect. Rhinopetalum. Fair warning: my plants took 7 years to flower from sowing -- but they produced their amazing foliage earlier than that.

I've been thinking about Uli in Portugal too, and also all our correspondents in other places undergoing terrible heat. We had a historic heat wave here in Oregon in June 2021, but this year seems normal so far, and no fires close enough to send a lot of smoke our way.

During the pandemic some plant groups experimented with presenting illustrated talks on Zoom. Our NARGS chapter did this with mostly good results. The programs combined live narration with screen-shared photos. I showed one old talk, one new one, and later did a program on Fritillaria for an Anchorage, Alaska group. Probably more than a few PBS members have similar programs they've prepared for groups. Should PBS offer an occasional online offering of this kind? We would need a coordinator to set  up the Zoom meeting and act as "host." I'm not sure how we could get the invitations to all our members, since few of them seem to be using this forum, and not all are on the email list. It is also an opportunity to see, at least briefly, the faces with whom we've been corresponding, sometimes, for years.

It would be well to wait and see how these new descriptions are accepted by the botanical profession. Crocus is a genus in which what some botanists view as a single species can be quite variable in morphological features, especially flower coloration. Brian Mathew has written well about ongoing development in Crocus, seeing "continua" rather than clearly separate species in certain groups. As a linguist, I am reminded of dialect continua, in which it is difficult to determine what degree of difference (percentage of mutual intelligibility) is necessary before one calls two varieties different "languages." A number of the Crocus varieties presented as species in Ruksans's book on the genus have been controversial, as are some of the new species published for Turkey in recent years. I don't know about Puschkinia.