Dear All, On the second day of the IBSA Symposium Leighan Mossop, an employee at the Cape Peninsula National Park, talked about the plant trade and their efforts in the park to protect the biodiversity of their flora. The three problems are development, alien vegetation, and illegal collection of plants by rare plant collectors and medicinal plant collectors. She told us that about 3000 plants had been used for medicine and some of them for thousands of years. So there is a demand for these plants. Syndicates have been developed to supply medicinal plants to areas that don't have them. The next talk was given by Ernst van Jaarsveld who is the curator of the succulent collection at Kirstenbosch. His talk was entitled, "Cliff Hanging Bulbs." He told of going out to search for these plants and showed pictures of some of his adventures and some of the ones he had found. Many have rounded or compact leaves and some are very tiny. If you can obtain them they often are easy to grow and make good basket plants. Some of them retain their drooping nature in cultivation. Sometimes bulblets drop down and you can find them if you look for them on the bottom of the cliff. Seed is dispersed by wind or gravity. Rachel Saunders presented a paper of Charles Craib's on Zantedeschias from Sekhukuneland. She showed pictures of some yellow flowered species, Z. jucunda, Z. pentlandii, and another one which may be a new species. The latter grows in an area that is very wet in summer and dry and sunny in winter and blooms all summer if the soil remains wet. It smells like a Tulbaghia. The next speaker was Jim Holmes who has a very large nursery in Stellenbosch that sells bulbs. He also exports. Many of us enjoyed visiting his nursery after the Symposium. Jim's talk was on Oxalis. I found the talk very interesting and took a lot of notes especially about different species and their habitats. This information is often difficult to come by and unfortunately this genus was not included in the new Manning and Goldblatt Encyclopedia which has given us so much good information about other things. Right before this talk in a conversation during the tea break I was told by one of the advisors on the book that Oxalis was not included because it was not a bulb. I asked what it was then and thought it was certainly a geophyte and corms, rhizomes, and tubers were included in the book. I couldn't get an answer. Jim told us of a woman who was working on the Dna and the biology of this genus. He told us she had determined that the South African Oxalis were true bulbs. In the book Cape Plants 118 are listed in the Cape Floral Kingdom so that may be the reason they are not included in the Encyclopedia. That section would have been very long and the key a huge challenge. Jim said Oxalis was the largest South African genera of true bulbs. There are 206 species and 270 varieties and probably a 60 or 80 species waiting to be described. He said there were 45 forms of Oxalis flava alone. We have talked on this list about how it is rare for most of the Oxalis in cultivation in countries besides South Africa to set very much seed. This contrasts with South Africa where a lot of seed is produced that is projected from the plant and almost immediately starts to germinate making it impossible to save for seed exchanges. If you grow a number of different species and are not careful you will soon have mixed species in your collection. We saw good examples of this in the Karoo Botanical Garden in Worcester where in some of the pots there looked like there could be three or four different things. I can't imagine how they could ever be sorted out. Why the difference I wondered. Lack of pollinators perhaps? Jim said Oxalis has a very short dormancy and delegates from Australia observed the same thing. I found that very interesting because in California with our dry summers the dormancy for my Oxalis is just as long as it is for many of my other South African bulbs. Some of mine start going dormant in late spring and there are no signs of action until mid fall in some of them even if I water them. Apparently just a little moisture can be enough to start them into growth and perhaps we don't get enough. Even when I water dry pots the water often runs down the side of the pots and doesn't really get the soil moist right away. I know there are a number of people on this list very interested in Oxalis so I hope if I haven't reported any of this accurately that Jim will correct me. The next speaker was scheduled to be Harold Koopowitz speaking on Clivias in California, but he was unable to attend. We had all been intrigued with all the wonderful plants that IBSA members brought and placed on display tables under lights (it was cold and raining remember) hoping they would open. So Harold's time was spent talking about some of these plants that we all clustered around during the breaks with a cup of something hot in our hands. After lunch we were treated to a Floral Rhapsody, a double projector slide show with music of some of the wonderful South African flowers arranged by Alan Horstmann and guaranteed to keep us awake. The pictures from several different photographers were first rate and we felt like even if we weren't going to see the floral displays we had read about in the field we could at least see them on screen. The next speaker, Robin Jangle gave a most interesting talk on Gethyllis. It's another talk that I took a lot of notes on and would be worthy of an entire email. There were a lot of Gethyllis in leaf on the display tables. I found them absolutely fascinating even without flowers or the fruit which appears at an entirely different time as the leaves or the flowers. The final speaker was Dave Lehmiller from Texas talking on Crinum. A lot of IBSA members are more interested in growing species than hybrids. Dave showed a lot of species of Crinum that he has seen in the wild and then showed the results of hybridizing between the different species. The results produced plants that were often different and he thought improved. His talk generated a lot of interest I suspect in people that hadn't expected they would find a talk about hybrids so interesting. Tomorrow I will write about the field days. Mary Sue