Dear Lee, Thanks for looking that up for me. It shows that the pattern in Crete is very similar to our Northern California pattern with the most rain falling between November and March and almost no rain in the summer. There are obviously a lot of factors determining when plants bloom and people have come up with a number of good ones: pollinators, weather, other plants in the area, and of course their genetic background. I liked Jim McKenney's suggestion that the lack of fall blooming plants in California was influenced by the origins of the California flora. That's an obvious conclusion, but not one I had thought about. John Bryan has often suggested that zipcodes would be a useful in determining weather patterns, but the Dallman book speaks to the importance of elevation and exposure to the ocean in determining weather patterns and within zipcodes in coastal areas there can be a large range. Where I live the newspaper runs the total rainfall figures for the last 8 years each week for our area. There is a range from 41 to 62 inches (1040 to 1575 mm) of rain for the 7 spots where rainfall has been recorded for the last eight years (years when we have had much less rain than the 8 years previously which included some El Nino years.) Storms dump a lot more rain on the ridges, seeming to just hang over them. That is why Cazadero (in your figures) has such high numbers. In the El Nino years it often climbed above 100 inches. (2540 mm.) I think some of our winter storms don't go very far south and that may explain the big drop in precipitation that you noted. In South Africa the opposite is true. Some of the winter storms that bring rain to Cape Town may not make it north to Namaqualand. Mary Sue