PBS Forum

Diane's recommendations are spot on. Tropaeolum speciosum might get too enthusiastic for you -- it really took over David Hale's second garden, in rainy Arch Cape, Oregon. Other plants of Chile's Lake District might succeed, though you are a bit colder. David had Lapageria rosea in that garden, and there is a range of beautiful climbing gesneriads; Mitraria has succeeded in warmer Portland gardens. Herbertia lahue will grow for you, though it's rather uninteresting. Many Galanthus (snowdrops) should be happy. The crocus species of the northern Balkan region tolerate a lot of moisture, as does Crocus vernus and its many commercial selections, also C. tommasinianus, and C. speciosus does well in moist sites. You could try the hardy African plants Galtonia and Eucomis, too.

If you mean a kind of support for stems, look up Kinsman Company.

To Bern's question about dogs and rodent control: I raised, trained, and showed Alaskan Malamute dogs for about 40 years, and would have one now if my knees still allowed me to run. In interior Alaska it was fun to watch them hunt voles under the snow, and they adapted the same technique (high pounce, stunning landing, quick dig) in soil after we moved to Oregon. I had a couple of females I could leave loose at night (fenced 10 acres), and they kept all the deer away but were cautious about the elk. They regularly caught rabbits, chipmunks (OK, cute, but pests to pots), field mice, even "mountain beavers" (Oplodontia), pack rats, rats, and moles, though they did not eat the moles, which apparently are unpalatable even to a dog. Coyotes and raccoons were chased away. They did not kill snakes, but they liked to roll on them for the nasty odor. This is, of course, an unspecialized working dog selected for survival!

A query came via the PBS website from a botanist working on a flora of Libya, to identify a Romulea sp. found there. He has now sent me a set of excellent photos, but I can't seem to copy and paste them individually even within my system, so I can't post one here. There is one Romulea reported from Libya, R. cyrenaica. These photos show a member of the R. bulbocodium group, but with very striking dark purple and bright yellow stripes on the reverse of the tepals. If someone can comment, I will forward the whole message to you, with the 6 .jpg attachments.

A deep dive into back issues of alpine gardening journals led me to notice many award-winning named cultivars of various bulb genera, some of which I had never seen in books, gardens, or catalogs. Most were of UK origin. Mainly those now grown in North America seem to be the ones that were propagated commercially. I wonder how many of the others are still extant in the UK and/or Europe? Do any of you preserve little-known cultivars of, say, Crocus? (I know you preserve those of Galanthus!) What are your hidden treasures? I promise not to write asking for them.

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.