Hi, I too am curious if any of the Delphiniums I gave the BX made it. I planted a number of my native Delphiniums in my garden a few years ago and some of them are returning every year and increasing and others have disappeared. They are surviving with very little water during their summer dormancy. Delphinium luteum is doing very well as is D. hesperium, D. nudicaule and D. parryi. D. nudicaule is now appearing in spots where it reseeded as well (pathways, etc.). Several times I've tried D. variegatum in the ground and it has only lasted a year each time. D. cardinale got eaten and the second time that happened did not resprout. The ones that are doing the best are the ones that grow in my county naturally or in coastal counties in California. I continue to try new species that are not mountain species that would spend their winter under snow when I get a chance with seed and when I have enough blooming size some of them go in the ground to trial. I really love them. My experience has been they transplant better if you grow them in a container for a couple of years until the rootstock is bigger before you put them out. I've two more new species about to bloom in the ground now and they make nice rock garden plants as they aren't very tall, but time will tell whether they return next year. Last week my husband and two of our friends spent seven plus days driving around mostly the central part of California looking for flowers. We knew we were too late for the desert and other places like Carrizo Plain. We had planned to go there, but a telephone call before we left revealed we were too late. Someone sent me the url below with this text: "the East side of Carrizo plains in the Tremblor range, orange & yellow daisies and blue phacelia". I recommend you click on it even if the plants aren't geophytes as the picture is rather amazing. http://desertusa.com/wildflo/images05/… In spite of missing the desert shows and Carrizo we found a lot of spectacular combinations of flowers and many geophytes and were very satisfied with all we saw. Every single day we found Dichelostemma capitatum (it is indeed widespread) and every day we found some kind of Delphinium in bloom. Figuring out which turned out to be fruitless in many cases and photographing them in focus wasn't easy either. The Jepson Manual which we had along has an impossible Delphinium key. The other geophytes that we had questions about were all the Alliums we saw. Since they often require you to look at the seed coat (if intact) with a microscope we were rather limited since we weren't digging bulbs. I hope to be able to write a bit about some of the things we saw and add some habitat pictures of some of the geophytes to the wiki: many Alliums, one Brodiaea species, five Triteleia species, one Fritillaria, multiple Delphiniums, several Dichelostemmas, and a number of Calochortus to name a few. Mary Sue
