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I will write to you privately to discuss the crocuses.

Thanks to Carlos for these beautiful photos, showing exactly how a Crocus species should be documented.

Carlos,  I have a couple of these Archibald collections, but when I moved 10 years ago I did not keep them separately labeled, so I can't provide authenticated material. Sorry!

Pumice is not an equivalent to perlite. I don't know what the UK-available pumice is like, though. I live in Oregon, where pumice is quarried and available in various forms. I use a great deal of gray-white, medium-diameter, ground pumice in my potting and seed-sowing soil mixes, and I always buy it unwashed with the fines present, because this adds nutrients. Roots will grow into a piece of pumice, but not into a piece of perlite. Pumice is somewhat heavy (though not as solid as, say, basalt), especially when wet; it absorbs and slowly releases moisture, unlike perlite. It does not migrate to the top of a pot as perlite would. Its pH is near-neutral. We also have a harder, dark red kind of pumice that is used as mulch, and some growers say its fines are a wonderful soil amendment.

As traditional, the USDA ignores the fact that the US west contains the Sierra Nevada and Cascade mountain ranges, not to mention the Siskiyou region with its varied topography. We'll stick with Sunset zones out here.

I've grown many species of Colchicum from seed, and their germination is very hard to predict. Few or none germinate the year when sown. They may germinate 1, 2, or 3 years later, and curiously, several species from different years of sowing can germinate within a week or two. I assume some temperature variation is responsible. I keep my seed pots in a shed where the temperatures are close to ambient. So keep the seed pots  for 3 years. After that I dump the whole pot, seeds and all, in among the plunged pots in my bulb house, and various things have germinated there, species to be identified.

Anne Carson's "Linnaeus Town" https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/anne-carson-linnaeus-town/ weaves the convention of a taxonomic key into a poem. Trace the path of thought to emotional response in this fascinating one-page work.

Variation in Crocus mathewii: These Crocus mathewii, grown from seed from the Michael Kammerlander collection, show two color forms. The white with violet throat is the "iconic" form usually illustrated and sought, but the lavender with violet throat is also frequent and co-occurs with the white in wild populations, which I have seen and photographed. It has been suggested that these are hybrid swarms. Crocus cancellatus subsp. mazziaricus can have a similar violet zone.

My father was a World War II veteran. Once when my brother, as a child, said that the USA had won every war it ever fought, our father replied, "No, this country has lost every war it was ever in," explaining the loss of lives, military and civilian, and the disasters any war brings. This was in the 1950s, when we were told a lot of lies by the government and our history classes barely mentioned slavery and Native American genocide, but there were adults around us who shared their personal knowledge of the past with children who still believed they should listen respectfully to their elders. And thanks to the Great Depression of the 1930s, when few could afford grad school, there were still actual scholars teaching in secondary schools.

I also have a very small form of Sternbergia lutea, I think from Crete, and it looks different from what I have as greuteriana. In the photo, the absence of leaves with the S. lutea is because I picked a flower and stuck it in the soil as a size comparison; the S. lutea does have leaves at anthesis. S. clusiana flowers before the leaves appear.
The small colchicum is Colchicum cupanii.

This photo compares three species of Sternbergia. The large flowers are Sternbergia clusiana; the medium-sized one, Sternbergia lutea; the very small one, Sternbergia greuteriana. Photographed in October 2023. The S. lutea was from commercial stock, the others grown here from seed.

Some time ago I requested nominations for PBS offices. The only office that will definitely become vacant at the end of this year is President. I received a few suggestions, but no nominations and no applications to be considered. I wrote that I needed names by October 15, and it is almost  upon us.
The president is the chief manager of PBS, organizing Zoom meetings and votes of the board, making decisions, and consulting with all the other officers and managers. The Society cannot operate without this officer. Surely we have members who value what PBS does for them enough to take on this admittedly detail-oriented task.
Please write to me privately (do not reply to list) as soon as possible if you would like to be considered.
janemcgary@earthlink.net

To OrchardB's question, Colchicum baytopiorum does flower well for me, but I don't keep it in a pot. I have some in a rock garden and some in a bulb lawn. It can increase by short stolons, so it's probably very unhappy in a restricted space. Some of the very small colchicums will do well if restricted, but the larger ones are more likely to expend their energy trying to get their corms  somewhere else. (C. baytopiorum I would call a medium-sized species.) They can descend to remarkable depths if restricted horizontally but given a deep substrate.

The pot is about 15 cm in diameter.

Finally this fall I have a useful way to confirm the identity of the many Colchicum species I've raised from seed over the years. "Colchicum: The complete guide," by Christopher Grey-Wilson, Rod Leeds, & Robert Rolfe, Royal Horticultural Society (2020), is a big, expensive volume. It may not be the last word on this still problematic genus, but it helps. The elaborate keys are easy to use; if you don't know the lexicon, there is a glossary in the back matter. Once you've spotted possibilities, you have to read the individual entries to see exactly how similar species are being distinguished. There are good color photos for most species, which give you a sense of the general habit of the plant. So far I've identified a stray one that got into the rock garden as C. baytopiorum, and one grown from seed as C. peloponnesiacum is almost certainly C. troodii. One that had lost its label when I lifted part of the bulb house this summer is definitely C. stevenii, which I knew I had somewhere. Some others seem to be true to name. It's not too hard to look at colchicums in flower because almost all the diagnostic parts are above ground.