Hi folks, I've been growing Hymenocallis off and on for 25 years here in central Indiana. Needless to say, most of them have been grown in pots, but...... For years I grew the Ismene types and the Mexican Hymenocallis in the garden in summer and dug them and stored dry indoors in winter. They flourished! but I didn't, as it got to be a real chore handling the digging in Fall and the planting in Spring. There was great increase, too. However, I gave up that method years ago. I have assembled a nice collection of Hymenocallis occidentalis, a.k.a. H. galvestonensis and H. caroliniana. They are quite hardy outdoors in the ground all year round here. Last summer, I tried another experiment: I planted Hymenocallis liriosme outdoors in the ground. That bulb is coming up! I'm fairly confident that it is really H. liriosme, since Thad Howard got it for me from the wild. The outdoors bulb was planted in a very protected spot, a few feet from the south end of my greenhouse. Still, it survived the winter! Both liriosme and occidentalis are big plants. I have a liriosme-like plant that was originally collected from a river bank in southern Louisiana and was then grown on a mountain-top in Arkansas (USDA zone 6), although not by me in either case. This one is blooming now in the greenhouse. I'm really not sure what it is; I grow it only in pots here, under my number JES-664. I am interested in the smaller Mexican species, since they have a pronounced dormant season in winter, don't take up a lot of space, and many of them bloom reliably in post. So far, I have HH. glauca, harrisiana ex hort, cf. phalangides, eucharidifolia, sonorensis, lehmilleri, and ? woelfleana. I recently received small bulbs of durangoensis, azteciana, and a new still-unnamed species collected by Thad Howard in 1994. Mexican but neither small nor deciduous is H. acutifolia. This one wants to grow in water. I keep the pots sitting in saucers all year round, filled with water in summer but more often dry in winter. I never leave the pots completely dry, not even in winter. This one grows in rivers in southern Mexico. Last year, the Hymeno SIG shared some Florida species. I am trying to grow HH. palmeri, puntagordensis, henryae, littoralis, and rotata. They came through the winter under the benches in the clivia greenhouse and are now shooting green foliage up. A Caribbean member of the Hymeno SIG shared HH. caribaea, expansa, and latifolia. These are BIG plants! I have them in 5-gallon containers. These seem to have come through the winter OK, but in years past I had trouble getting Caribaea Group species through the winter in the greenhouse. They are really tropical species. I have a pot of Leptochiton quitoensis that are now at bloom size. A friend collected these from a farm in Ecuador some years ago, and shared a few small offsets or seedlings with me. They are small plants with relatively huge staminal cups on the flowers. They have a long winter dormancy when they are kept dry but warm, under a bench in the clivia greenhouse I started a Hymenocallis Species Interest Group last year. We have about 14 members at present; and we use a CC: e-mail list, not a Yahoo group. Anyone interested should contact me privately at <jshields@indy.net> to be added to the list. Please include a short summary of your activities with Hymenocallis. Best regards, Jim Shields in central Indiana ************************************************* Jim Shields USDA Zone 5 Shields Gardens, Ltd. P.O. Box 92 WWW: http://www.shieldsgardens.com/ Westfield, Indiana 46074, USA Tel. ++1-317-867-3344 or toll-free 1-866-449-3344 in USA