Jim McKenney asked, >Years ago I remember buying corms of Crocus ancyrensis 'Golden Bunch'. I was >reminded of this by Tony Goode's wiki photo of this cultivar. > >Recently I reread the account of Crocus in Collins Guide to Bulbs (1961) and >ran across this cultivar name used for a form of Crocus suterianus. Twenty >years later Matthew treated suterianus a form of Crocus olivieri olivieri. > >So, fellow crocomanes, is there someone out there who can tell me if there >are two Crocus cultivars with the name 'Golden Bunch', one a form of C. >ancyrensis and the other a form of Crocus o. olivieri? I looked in Antoine Hoog's descriptive catalog, which I often rely on for the last word on Dutch selections of the more unusual bulbs, and he describes this as "C. ancyrensis ... a free flowering selection of the 'Ankara' crocus, raised in Holland, also sold under the cultivar name 'Golden Bunch'." Janis Ruksans lists a different selection of C. ancyrensis "far better than usually grown Dutch form of garden origin." If you see C. ancyrensis and C. olivieri together, they are fairly easy to distinguish. C. olivieri is not difficult to grow from seed. It has a marvelous form known as subsp. balansae, with deep orange, strongly marked flowers; a selection of that subspecies, 'Zwanenburg', is commercially available, though not cheap. Subspecies olivieri usually has lighter yellow flowers. Jane McGary Northwestern Oregon, USA