Recent wiki additions--Veratrum, Lachenalia, Nothoscordum
Mary Sue Ittner (Sat, 17 Apr 2004 19:29:54 PDT)

Dear All,

My theme for today are three plants that have had negative press.

I recently found my husband had taken a picture of our rare fringed corn
lily, Veratrum fimbriatum. I've been admiring the leaves as they emerge
lately on my hikes. They really are impressive. This plant flowers in late
summer and at that time can be a bit scruffy after all kinds of insects
have had a chance to eat it and without rain for months everything can be
dusty. Still I was rather surprised to read that this species was
unattractive in Bulbs of North America. I'm not sure I'd call it beautiful,
but the flowers are very intricate and certainly interesting. Since it is
one of the geophytes that grows where I live and rare, we consider it
special although I'd never think to grow it since it gets so big and needs
a very wet place which my garden isn't in summer. I asked all the people in
my hiking group when we stopped to look at it this week where it has
emerged in very wet sag ponds and the consensus was that the leaves were
very attractive at least in the early months. I didn't have a camera with
me so these were last year's pictures.

http://pacificbulbsociety.org/pbswiki/index.php/…

Blooming recently for me was Lachenalia bachmanii. Graham Duncan describes
it as not particularly attractive, but I like it. Some of the "must have"
Lachenalias he lists don't always appeal to me. Obviously what looks good
to one person may not to others.

http://pacificbulbsociety.org/pbswiki/index.php/…

The third plant deserves its bad reputation as an invasive aggressive weed.
It is Nothoscordum gracile. I saw it all over the Huntington Garden in
Southern California where they will probably never get rid of it. After
David Fenwick praised Tulbaghias I decided to grow some from seed and have
gotten seed of three different species from NARGS seed exchanges that all
turned out to be this pest instead. It is very disheartening. The latest
was supposed to be Tulbaghia capensis which is brown to purple and green
with an orange corona. You wouldn't think it could be confused with a white
flower. But in my search to confirm my suspicion I found that pictures of
Nothoscordum gracile are hard to find. The pictures on the web are not very
good and the best one I could find, the one below, I think is of something
else.

http://ortobotanicoportici.unina.it/Piante/…

There ought to be a section in generic bulb books that shows pictures of
some of the ones to avoid or they should be pictured along with all the
other bulbs so people could confirm that the one they have is not
desirable. So before I toss this new batch as I have done the others in the
past, I have added some photographs to the wiki. When it finally opens, the
flowers are kind of attractive and nicely fragrant, but a lot of the time
the flowers are closed. It certainly has been known by a lot of different
names so I added all the synonyms on the wiki. Maybe I'll get a shot of the
bulblets around the mother bulb if I find time as it and the soil goes in
the trash.

http://pacificbulbsociety.org/pbswiki/index.php/…

Mary Sue