This is an interesting and baffling email in a few respects. I live in Southern California and the California native bulbs listed are very hard to find for sale. They also have a reputation for being very difficult to grow in general and my experience is the same. To say they are “too easy to grow” is a big surprise to me. Perhaps they are easy in Oregon but not in Southern California though many are native here. If someone knows of sources for bulbs (rather than seeds), I’d love to get that information.
Nan Sterman
> On Jun 6, 2020, at 11:15 AM, Jane McGary via pbs <pbs@lists.pacificbulbsociety.net> wrote:
>
> Two notes on Californian bulbs now in flower:
>
> 1. Seed received from the PBS BX in 2015 as Calochortus appendiculatus has flowered here and all individuals are C. luteus.
>
> 2. Plants grown from NARGS seedex seed as "Brodiaea synandra Salmon" (presumably referring to Mike Salmon's old Monocot seed list) are definitely not that entity. "B. synandra" is now called B. insignis. My plants are a Brodiaea with quite prominent violet staminodes fitting the description (inrolled, hooded) in the Jepson Manual for B. jolonensis (most Brodiaea species with prominent staminodes, including B. insignis, have white or pale ones). The perianth is funnel-shaped ("ascending") rather than the widely opening perianth described for B. insignis. However, the staminodes are almost twice as long as the style, while Jepson has them about the same length in B. insignis and B. jolonensis. B. terrestris can have violet staminodes, but they also don't exceed the style according to Jepson; also, I'm pretty familiar with B. terrestris and this doesn't look like it. Anyway, "synandra" is an obsolete name if you have it on something. I wonder if it refers to the relative positions of the stamens and staminodes, which are "held close" in both insignis and jolonensis. (If you're new to Brodiaea, the staminodes are three infertile structures that alternate with the three fertile stamens. Not all Brodiaea species have them, but most do.)
>
> Admittedly, brodiaeas, which are or recently were grouped with Dichelostemma, Triteleia, Bloomeria, and a couple of other genera in the Themidaceae, are not "choice" plants to most PBS members, probably because they're too easy to grow. Triteleia laxa was one of my favorite wildflowers when I was a child in California and loved to find it among the dry grasses. Almost all of them (like many Calochortus species) flower much later than other dry-summer bulb species, so they are useful in the June garden if their winter-growing leaves can be accommodated there and hidden, as they wither, by surrounding plants in early-summer growth, which also support the themids' tall stems. Most of them seem to tolerate some summer water while dormant. They don't take many years from sowing to flowering, either. In nature they often grow in scrub, where their stems elongate to raise the flowers into the open; one, Dichelostemma volubile, is actually a twiner and can get more than a meter up into a shrub. Because of the long, bare stems, all look best when closely planted in the garden.
>
> Jane McGary, Portland, Oregon, USA
>
>
>
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