Dear all, My husband and I returned from four weeks in Australia last week, but still haven't caught up with everything yet. I look forward to reading all the messages when I have time about what promotes blooming. We came back to early rains in northern California so we have been so much more fortunate that people who live in our state in southern California. Our fire season has been declared over. It's heartbreaking what it happening to the south. I hope that members of our group who live there are not in danger. Before I left I got all my Oxalis planted and watered. A long time ago on this forum Lauw de Jager remarked that if you didn't start winter growing Oxalis late summer it sometimes didn't bloom or skipped a year. Whether it was starting it earlier or the early rains, I don't know, but I have a lot of Oxalis looking really wonderful and blooming well. Yesterday I was amazed to see three flowers on Oxalis melanosticta 'Ken Aslet' which I obtained in 1999 but has never bloomed before. Oxalis livida is blooming too which it often doesn't and I have a beautiful new mauve Oxalis hirta that Ron Vanderhoff gave me that is covered in flowers. Also after experimenting I have found that a number of species do better in deeper pots and need some nutrition to flower well. I know some people grow them in sand feeling they retain their tight form, but that means you have to water more and I've had better luck with soil mixes that are quite so lean. But back to Australia. We visited areas in southern Australia (Western Australia and Victoria). The southwestern part of Western Australia had received about average rainfall and there are parts of it that area that are considered rainforest and get year round rainfall we were told. I though most of Western Australia had a Mediterranean climate so that surprised me. Most of the rain that occurred while we were there happened at night so we had good opportunities to hike and see plants during the day. This was our third trip to Australia and I have always found the flora fascinating. Although there are a few thinks that are like our California flora (viola for one thing), most of the families are even different and there are plants unlike any others. The forests were wonderful. In WA there is a beautiful and amazing understory of flowering plants. In Victoria the ferns in the forest are equally beautiful. There are a lot of interesting monocots. I don't suppose that some of them qualify as geophytes. Many of them have very intriguing underground root structures. I found looking some of the things up we saw on the Kew Monocot check list that they are hemicryptophytes . This was a new term for me. Stems are herbaceous and often die back after the growing season with shoots at soil level surviving and buds just on or below soil level. I guess that is a fancy term for perennials. Many of the monocots, even some in the Liliaceae family, are given this label so they must not have bulbs, corms, tubers, or rhizomes. So I don't know if they should be included in the wiki although we sometimes include some of the related things even if they aren't really geophytes and just label them accordingly. Apparently Sowerbaea falls in this category as does Calectasia (sometimes referred to as the tinsel lily). Even if I don't include these related genera, there are still a lot of things that qualify for the wiki that would be new as there are a number of geophytes with tubers or rhizomes that we do not have represented. The really thrill was seeing all the terrestrial orchids. We had a book that we brought along published in 2000 (A Field Guide to the Native Orchids of Southern Australia) by David and Barbara Jones. In this book it is said that there are 1200 species of native orchids in Australia and more than 100 genera. This book just covers those south of latitude 27 degrees south. Even with that limitation a lot of the species that could be represented in the book had to be left out. We saw a lot of some of the common ones that we could clearly identify, but others kept us puzzling. It was always exciting when we found them, even if they weren't very big. My husband is a great plant spotter and a number of times he'd find a single plant when we were hiking that we never saw duplicated. Other times once you found one and got your eyes accustomed to what you were looking for you saw a lot more. I was also fascinated by a lot of the Drosera we saw. Many are tuberous so would qualify for the wiki. One plant we saw almost every day we were out was Romulea rosea which is from South Africa. It has naturalized everywhere. There was also a fair amount of Allium triquetrum and Watsonia meriana (the weedy form with bubils). Since Australia has had a number of years of drought and a fire dependent ecology some of the areas we visited had burned this year and the year before. We saw grass trees (Xanthorrhoea), once classified in Liliaceae, but now in its own family and not a geophyte, blooming in mass. This is a very amazing sight as each flowering stem has hundreds of flowers and they were usually full of pollinators. They are sporadic bloomers that are often triggered to bloom after a fire. The forests are burned regularly to keep the fuel load low, but even so fires occur. It was heartening when we walked in one national park that had burned in February to see all the trees resprouting. Tree trunks were black, but there was new growth already quite tall and a lot of plants had sprouted and grown so well that you wouldn't have known there had been a fire in the vicinity if you just looked at them. Unfortunately houses that burn don't recover so quickly. We were able to arrange a visit with Don Journet, a member of this pbs list, who grows Lachenalia. We were traveling with four friends at the time and he and his wife kindly led us on two hikes, one to a gorge that impressed us with how physically fit he and his wife are. As always it is so nice to meet members of this group in person and we really had a great time. Where he lives was suffering more from the drought than any place we visited however. He can only water outside two hours from 6 to 8 a.m. twice a week and the worrisome thing is that this is nearing the time when normally rainfall would be less. He sacrificed one of the days we were with him as he met us at 8 and it was one of the days of the week when watering was permitted. Our last day in Australia my husband and I drove to Menzies Creek in Victoria to visit Will Ashburner (not quickly as driving through Melbourne we made a number of wrong turns.) We wish Australia would have the names of the streets on both corners as when you get on the wrong street from the round abouts there is no way of telling what street you are on. Some of the members of this list may remember Will Ashburner from the old IBS forum. We had visited him in Australia once before and he had made a trip through California following that staying with many of the other forum members throughout the state and there had been a couple of meetings where he was present. In Northern California he gave a lot of us a lecture on air filled porosity in soils and concluded that the potting soil that most of us could purchase in the garden centers was suitable for bogs. He claimed the soils in Australia had much better porosity. Will and his wife purchased a bulb business a number of years ago and moved to the property. It is in a beautiful area of Victoria and the previous owners had planted a lot of shrubs, native and exotic and many were in bloom. Will says that they get enough rain there that much of what he is grown in the ground needs very little extra water. He took us on a tour of his daffodil beds. Some were still blooming. He rotates where he grows them and is doing a little hybridizing too. He grows a lot of what he sells there, but trades daffodils for some things like tulips with a grower in Tasmania where it gets colder. We very much enjoyed seeing him again and he wished to be remembered to the friends he made in the past. He says he doesn't have a lot of time to participate in the Internet these days. For those of you who are interested this is his web site: http://www.daffodilbulbs.com.au/ And if Bill Dijk is reading this, the Cyclamen he grew from seed you shared has grown well and was looking good. I never finished adding all the pictures of bulbs and corms I took in South Africa more than a year ago to the wiki and now I have pictures from Australia to be added some day. I'm not sure when I'll get around to it, but check the recent changes pages every now and then as I'll try to work on it as I can find the time. Mary Sue