First of all, thanks to John Grimshaw for the Leucojum/Acis/Galanthus update. It's great to hear about this, hot off the press so-to-speak. This sort of information is one more good reason to be grateful for the participation on this list of so many people who practice gardening from so many different perspectives. If everyone else close to the source did a bit more to publicize such information, it would make it a lot easier for those of us who don't travel in professional botanical circles. I've found the reaction to Mr. Grimshaw's report interesting to say the least: there is plenty of evidence of two disparate camps trying, badly, to communicate. Unspoken so far is one underlying problem. Science provides evidence for relationship, and each generation of botanists has resorted to ever more complex technology to finesse our understanding of such relationships. But once the science is done, someone has to interpret it. That means someone has to fit twenty-first century science into the eighteenth century hierarchical categories of traditional classification. And that is the unspoken problem: science can provide insight into how things are related, but science has nothing to say about those eighteenth century categories of classification. Science can tell us if spring snowflake and summer snowflake are more closely related to one another than they are to other snowflakes. But science does not tell us specifically that they are related at a generic level. That decision is not a scientific decision; that decision is the result of a very human opinion. The solution reported, i.e. keeping spring snowflake and summer snowflake as the genus Leucojum and placing the remaining snowflakes in the genus Acis, with the understanding that this narrower Leucojum is more closely related to Galanthus than to Acis, is only one of several possible treatments which would preserve the relationship indicated by the science. It strikes me as the one which will do the least damage (that's the non-scientist speaking) while allowing some needed reorganization (that's the scientist). I would love to have heard the discussions which must have touched on the other possibilities: putting them all into one genus, for instance, or putting Galanthus and the narrow Leucojum together in one genus and the leaving the Acis sorts as a separate genus. Jim McKenney jimmckenney@starpower.net Montgomery County, Maryland, zone 7 where Leucojum vernum is still in bloom and I'm off to make some new labels as I listen to Dame Joan warble "Must I my Acis still bemoan..." and wonder if peer review and public outcry will once again have Acis "inglorious crush'd beneath that stone!"