Dear All, All of this talk of trees as companions and providing assistance to bulb planted in the garden reminds me of 3 private gardens I was lucky enough to visit that used this concept to advantage. The first was the garden of Sir Peter Smithers in the Italian part of Switzerland. In his book, The Adventures of a Gardener, he describes his philosophy of gardening that you are creating an ecosystem that supports itself over time so that as you get older the work gets less. (Now why can't I remember that which I recognized as a great idea!) He has planted many bulbs around deciduous trees (lots of Magnolias for one thing as I remember.) They grow and flower and then the trees leaf out and provide shade and interest during the summer as the bulbs are drying up and going dormant. The second was probably the most dramatic and one I will never forget even though I only spent a couple of hours there. This was the small garden of Gary Buckley, created when he lived in Victoria, Australia. He had moved there from Tasmania where the climate was much more moderate and the summer heat was not kind to the plants he loved. So he dug out his whole garden down to the pipes and replaced all the soil with his special bulb mix. Then he planted some fifty plus weeping advanced alders, cherries, elms, birches and beeches in a winning attempt to create a micro climate, which worked. Beneath them he planted cyclamen, small iridaceae, smallish amaryllidaceae, and other things he liked. The day we visited in October 1998 some of the things he had in bloom or just finishing (I'll just do genus to save space): cyclamen, anemone, trillium, polygonatum, rhodohypoxis, aristea, orthosanthus, tulbaghia, diplarrena, hippeastrum, allium, arisaema, oxalis, clivia, moraea, ipheion, sauromatus, leucocoryne, ornithogalum, sprekelia, tritonia, iris, wachendorfia, melasphaerula, lachenalia, dicentra, scilla. There were non geophytes too, but you get the picture. The one drawback to his plan (at least it seemed a big one to me in these days when water seems to be a commodity in short supply) was that his garden needed copious amounts of water in summer when his trees were in growth. He sometimes hand watered twice a day. Still, he made up for that in not having a lot of pots to tend to. The last example is Wayne Roderick's garden in Northern California. After moving to live in the redwoods and seeing the perennials I brought with me decrease every year and stop flowering, I overheard Wayne talking about the way to survive living with redwoods, plant bulbs. Most of Wayne's bulbs, like Gary's and Sir Peter's were in the ground. Wayne had planted many of his in raised beds, but over time I am sure they (like Gary is Hawaii's vegetable bed) were a mass of redwood roots. Redwoods are not deciduous, but they certainly have the root action to extend to reach any moisture to 30 ft (abt. 100 meters) away. Wayne boasted that he had bulbs blooming in his garden year round without having to water. Mary Sue