Roy's comments -- I can't recall where he's writing from, is it the Midwest? -- are good evidence that using USDA zone ratings for bulbs is pretty useless. Indeed, using zone ratings for any plant anywhere west of the Rocky Mountains is, in my opinion, next to useless. (It's probably useless even in the east where any amount of elevational difference exists.) Yet nursery catalogs and books continue to provide these numbers in the belief that they can't explain anything more complicated to their customers and readers, just as we have to keep using the outdated English measurement system for the benefit of U.S. readers who slept through the introduction of the metric system in third grade. The most startling thing in Roy's note is his success with Erythronium grandiflorum, an alpine species that is very difficult to flower at low elevation in the West. The only form I have that flowers reliably is a tiny, short form that comes, I think, from Idaho. Yet E. grandiflorum grows extensively in the mountains and river gorge less than an hour's drive from my home. And here is Roy, planting it in a "generic shady perennial bed," despite the fact that in nature it grows in shallow, rocky soils, not always in shade, and gets next to no water in summer; and it flowers for him. Is it getting the right amount of winter there, whereas it doesn't in Portland, Oregon? Like Paige, I grow plenty of erythroniums well beyond their natural range and in winters harsher than they would experience in nature. They don't all enjoy exactly the same garden conditions; for instance, I recently visited a garden where E. helenae and E. californicum were flourishing in a "generic shady perennial bed," but E. multiscapideum was struggling and suffering from botrytis -- the last much prefers a very well drained site and is in full bloom in a scree bed at my place today. As for E. tuolumnense, I would not expect it to have much genetic variation, given its narrow endemism. It's been used for hybridizing because of its strong propensity to produce offsets, which is passed on to such hybrids as 'Pagoda' and 'Citronella', and to a slightly lesser degree to 'Sundisc'. Perhaps this offsetting tendency is linked to the shy flowering Mary Sue mentions. Why produce flowering stems for the deer to eat, when you can make a hundred bulblets for the gophers to distribute? As for hybrids of E. revolutum, at one time E. elegans was thought to be a natural hybrid of this and E. montanum, but I will have to look back (despite my dread of doing so) at the articles by Art Guppy published in the Rock Garden Quarterly a few years ago and see what he had to say about this. These articles, which are anecdotal in the extreme, not to mention hard to read, nonetheless contain a good deal of empirical information about the genus, which is why I went ahead and published them, under continuous fire from the author. Jane McGary Northwestern Oregon, USA At 04:12 AM 4/13/2010, you wrote: >Pacific Rim wrote: > > Careful. Diana is the most scrupulous grower I have encountered in my own > > life as a grower. > > >Agreed!! I was just comparing Diana's listing to Jane's much more >conservative rating. Maybe it is even hardier--Brent and Becky list it >as Z3-9, growable (or at least winter hardy) in every state of the lower >48. I personally have never grown tuolumnense, but 'Pagoda' is fine >here, but reputed to be easier to grow. Any Zone 3 or 4 (with unreliable >snow) growers out there? > >Nobody has mentioned E. grandiflorum as a worthy westerner. It has been >fine here for a few seasons in a generic shady perennial bed, nothing >special. Not really showy, but it is cute. Any other fans? > >--Roy >_______________________________________________ >pbs mailing list >pbs@lists.ibiblio.org >http://pacificbulbsociety.org/list.php >http://pacificbulbsociety.org/pbswiki/ > >--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- >Text inserted by Panda GP 2009: > > This message has NOT been classified as spam. If it is unsolicited > mail (spam), click on the following link to reclassify it: > http://localhost/Panda/… >---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------