University gardens are like museums - anything that gets donated amounts to a mortgage. Someone has to catalog it, and someone has to take care of it going forward. My brother asked the local university if they could use some of his rare books for their library. They said they'll take any books he wants to give them as long as a $25 check is wrapped around each one. Our local iris club donated a collection of iris that had been hybridized by a local member (Wister medal winner, inter alia) to UT Gardens. That little plot lasted a few years and soon ran to ruin. Let's face it - every faculty is playing in his own little sandbox and any students he funds or supervises will be pushing his narrow research interests. He has to rent greenhouse space for $X per sq m using his project funding. So unless a mega donor hands the school a huge endowment to maintain a collection for conservation, education, or public display, the collection is a white elephant. And we don't have any royals who need to give back some of the billions they stole from the peasants over the last thousand years. On the other hand, if plants can be rescued from this fate by distributing to people like us, it's a win-win deal: The plants live, and we do the work for free. I'm not suggesting some kind of PBS garden someplace. Club gardens never work because the two people who actually start doing all the work eventually throw in the towel because they can work like a mule in their own gardens. I'm suggesting that we simply make it known that we will take excess plants and get them into the hands of knowledgeable, fanatical growers with a history of cultivating, studying, and SHARING these plants with fellow members and anyone else we can find. If the alternative is the dumpster this would seem like a no-brainer, but then universities continue to surprise me and regularly undershoot my already low expectations of them. Bob E TN _______________________________________________ pbs mailing list pbs@lists.pacificbulbsociety.net http://lists.pacificbulbsociety.net/cgi-bin/… Unsubscribe: <mailto:pbs-unsubscribe@lists.pacificbulbsociety.net>