Booksellers, was Bulb and Seed Exchange

Jane McGary janemcgary@earthlink.net
Sun, 29 Mar 2020 12:23:34 PDT
Good of Robin Hansen to mention of Powell's Books as an online seller. 
Their new-and-used inventory is huge (a full city block and three or 
four floors) and their service is efficient. I always check the 
extensive gardening section when going there. I should probably haul 
about one-third of my plant library there and sell it, too.

However, don't bite on John Bryan's revised "Bulbs" even at half price. 
I edited this book, and you won't find my name in the Acknowledgments 
because I told Timber Press to leave it out. It required massive fact 
checking and correction, and at the time of publication we didn't have 
the resources now available. The photos are not worth the price, and 
probably some of them are misidentified anyway.

If Martyn Rix's "Growing Bulbs" (different from the photo book Robin 
mentioned) shows up on their list, do buy that one. I bought enough 
copies of it to share from Powell's a few years ago. It is a wonderful 
work for learning about how geophytes have evolved, where they grow, and 
how to grow them in our gardens.

That leads me to the eternal plea for Rix to publish his monograph on 
Fritillaria, which I understand is now being worked on by collaborators. 
Seeds I've received as "Fritillaria sp." are flowering now, and they 
look like a lot of different things, usually small, narrowly conical, 
and mostly green. (Wild-collected "sp." is often F. crassifolia.) I 
sometimes can find diagnostic clues in the old AGS Encyclopaedia of 
Alpines, to which Rix contributed the section on Fritillaria. That 
helped Mark Akimoff and me recently to ascertain that similar plants in 
our collections were all F. elwesii (papillose style) and none were F. 
latakiensis (glabrous style), two names often confused.

Jane McGary, Portland, Oregon, USA


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