Jim McKenney is suggesting putting Colchicum luteum into the refrigerator after it has gone dormant. While I would never stop anyone experimenting, one needs to think how these plants grow in the wild. As I understand it, C. luteum has a huge distribution in Central Asia eastwards to Kashmir: all areas that have a long hot summmer quickly followed by cold winters. The Colchicums, I believe, emerge as the ground melts and do their thing quickly before the summer heat comes on. The point is, however, that a long hot summer is experienced, and I suspect that this is necessary to the plant's physiology to trigger the initiation of new buds etc. It may well be disrupted if the bulbs receive too long a chilling, especially at the wrong time of year. In the UK C. luteum has a reputation for being difficult to grow, and being a martyr to botrytis. What happens is that they are planted in autumn and watered like other bulbs. We have no cold weather worth mentioning (these days especially) and the poor things come into flower in December, elongated in the low light so they look quite terrible. Then the flower fades and flops onto the foliage, and promptly develops botrytis, encouraged by the high atmospheric humidity. This spreads into the foliage and in no very long time, the plant is dead. To get round this I leave my pots of C. luteum and C. kesselringii (another C Asian species) dry from the time the plants go dormant until January, and repot them then. I did it just last Friday, 16 Jan, this year. The bulbs have a fringe of embryonic roots and the shoot is well developed, so as soon as they are watered (as they would be with snow melt in the wild) they develop rapidly and will be in flower within the next few days. The growth remains compact and the plants grow with increasing daylength and warmth. Botrytis remains a problem, but is much less so than earlier in the winter. I have been growing C. luteum from Kashmir since 1989 and from Tadjikistan since 1991 (also C. kesselringii) so these 'difficult' species can be maintained for a reasonable length of time. The biggest problem with this method is to keep the plants growing long enough to build up a decent new corm; a touch of dryness in about April will send them promptly to dormancy. This obviously happened with mine last year, as they are smaller than I really would like to see, but they're now back under my eye. What I would suggest is that the bulbs could be potted in autumn and allowed to make some root growth, but are then put into cold storage until the spring or late winter. But it would have to be cold, 1-2 deg C; any warmer and they will grow! John Grimshaw Dr John M. Grimshaw Gardens Cottage Colesbourne Nr Cheltenham Gloucestershire GL53 9NP Website: http://www.colesbournegardens.org.uk/ ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jim McKenney" <jimmckenney@starpower.net> To: "Pacific Bulb Society" <pbs@lists.ibiblio.org> Sent: Thursday, January 22, 2004 2:37 AM Subject: Re: [pbs] Five favorite yellow-flowered geophytes > > Here's what I'm about to try for Colchicum luteum and, should I be able to > acquire another one, Iris winogradowii: after the plants enter dormancy, > I'll give them a few weeks at prevailing temperatures and then try storing > them in the refrigerator for the rest of the summer. The refrigerator here > gets opened so many times a day that the temperature is probably in the low > 40s F much of the time, if that. >