Topics for discussion on our list
Mary Sue Ittner (Sat, 27 Nov 2004 17:31:22 PST)

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