Hi everybody, Our list has been quiet lately so I hate to see new discussion grind to a halt. There never has been a lot of off topic discussion that lasts for very long on this list. Arnold and I rarely intervene as we haven't felt we had to. When we started this list and the Pacific Bulb Society we mainly wanted the discussion to be friendly, to be focused on bulbs and geophytes in general, but to allow some discussion about plants that could be companions to bulbs. Even those of us who are most fanatical about growing bulbs do grow other things. We've been liberal in what we included as geophytes for our wiki as well. There are genera that may have a few geophytes even though most of the species are not and talking about the ones that are geophytes is fine. It sounds like Jim Shields has discovered a few Aloes that fall in this category. If we were being overwhelmed with messages perhaps we'd have to be more restrictive, but we have far fewer posts than we used to have. It is helpful for the subjects to be clearly labeled so that people can skip subjects that they are not interested in. I was curious about this statement of Rodger's: "And given the history of the PBS, there is a special emphasis on amaryllids, esp. those of the New World." I don't think we have a special emphasis on amaryllids. We talk about whatever people on this list bring up. I did a quick check of the genera we have talked about as topics of the week and I counted at least 16 different families represented. We have talked about more amaryllids it is true, but only one more genus than we've talked about in the Hyacinthaceae family, and the Iridaceae family is close behind. If all those California species like Brodiaea, Dichelostemma, Triteleia, Calochortus hadn't recently been taken out of Liliaceae that family would have been well represented as well. Mary Sue PBS List Administrator