Thanks, Jane and Alberto, now we're getting a little closer to still elusive truth. I don't know why, but when I first started in Crocus, I understood 'Golden Bunch' to be a sort of vernacular sobriquet for Crocus ancyrensis in general: Crocus ancyrensis, the Golden Bunch Crocus, just as one would say Crocus sativus, the Saffron Crocus. Jane's quote from Hoog's list makes this reading unlikely. Do you share my exasperation with lists which announce new cultivars without specifying their hierarchical rank (sorry to have said it in such an ugly way)? For instance, in the Hoog list Jane cites, Golden Bunch is described as a 'selection' of Crocus ancyrensis. What does this word 'selection' mean? I'll bet that no one knows for sure. For instance, is 'Golden Bunch' - to take one extreme of the many possibilities - one particular clone of Crocus ancyrensis? Or -to take the opposite extreme - does 'Golden Bunch' correspond to the non-clonal progeny of a particularly nice seed-raised strain, perhaps from a localized, distinct wild population of Crocus ancyrensis? We may never know, in part because commercial propagation sooner or later almost always comes to rely on the propagation of particular clones. What we buy today may be clonal in nature, even if the original 'Golden Bunch' was more in the nature of a seed raised strain. These distinctions are hardly irrelevant. If 'Golden Bunch' was originally a clonal selection, then its seedlings cannot bear the same name. A practical person might at this point want to mention the likelihood that seedlings nearly identical to the original clone might easily arise and not be noticed and become inextricably mixed with the 'true' stock. Years ago I saw someone offering what they claimed to be the original clone of Rudbeckia 'Goldsturm'. Good luck as you pays yer money and gets yer... Last year, I raised similar questions about the identity of the tulip 'Red Emperor'. I find the historical facts equally ambiguous in that case. 'Red Emperor' is known to have been of wild origin, and it apparently does not correspond completely with wild Tulipa fosteriana as we know it today. By the way, Alberto, I share your respect for Patrick Synge's legacy: his published work had a profound influence on the development of my interest in bulbs and good garden plants in general. In Mathew's (notice that I have spelled his name correctly this time; his name is for me the modern equivalent of Signor Tommasini's name: I always have to stop and ask myself how many t's or how many m's ?) treatment of the genus, C. ancyrensis and C. olivieri are both placed in Mathew's Section Nudiscapus, C. ancyrensis in the Series Reticulati Mathew and C. olivieri in the Series Flavi Mathew. So while to the casual observer they are just yellow crocuses, to the student of crocus they are well separated. Synge probably based his treatment on that in Bowles, where C. ancyrensis (with no mention of 'Golden Bunch') is placed among Bowles' 'Eastern Reticulate Species' and C. olivieri among Bowles' 'Aureus Group'. For those of you who don't eat and breathe Crocus, C. aureus is an old synonym of C. flavus - so the basic arrangement has strong similarities. I point all of this out to emphasize that the distinction between C. ancyrensis and C. olivieri has been clearly maintained throughout the period in question, making it more likely (to my way of thinking) that there were at one time two 'Golden Bunch' cultivars - or a significant goof in identification! Jim McKenney jimmckenney@starpower.net Montgomery County, Maryland, USA, USDA zone 7, where I think the mother lode of this vein of gold is still ahead of us.