Hi Jim, I don't know whether you were a member of this list when I reported on the IBSA symposium and my last trip to South Africa. In one of my posts I wrote this: "In one of the IBSA bulb chats Alan Horstmann wrote that the consensus of the IBSA members at one of their meetings was that to get Nerine sarniensis to bloom reliably it needs to have a totally dry dormancy. This goes against what many of us have discovered. In fact as we have discussed on this list watering in summer on a regular basis has meant that a lot of people who weren't getting blooms now are. Hamish in his excellent topic of the week introduction on Nerine spoke of needing to keep the perennial roots from drying out. We visited with Mary Stobie, an IBSA member from Greyton. She told us this species grows high in her mountains where there are often mists in summer. Plants are growing in the rocks and probably only get sun for a few hours every day. They seem to be in very little soil, but she speculated the mists and the rocks probably keep the roots cool and prevent the plants from drying out. This would be quite different conditions than a bulb in a plastic pot would get for those of us who live in warm dry climates. She introduced me to a lady who had a large patch in her garden growing under the shade of an oak tree with Veltheimia bracteata. This area gets regular summer water, but no doubt the oak roots absorb a lot of it. Every year in the fall she has quite a show. Her plants are reseeding and increasing so every year it only gets better." This is a plant with winter rainfall and dry summers. It is dormant in summer. There are a number of evergreen Nerines and some that are in growth in summer which no doubt would work much better in your climate Jim. That is what Jim Shields has discovered. In my climate Nerine sarniensis hybrids began to get diseased in winter when I left them out exposed to our rainfall (50-60 inches between November and May, but heaviest December, January, February.) So even though my plants are in growth during the rainy season, they have looked a whole lot better since I moved them to my cool greenhouse during our rainy season and kept the rain off their leaves. Jim's post made me smile. Mark Twain is reported to have said that the coldest winter he ever spent was summer in San Francisco. Where I live on California's north coast it's rare for people to sit outside in the evenings. You'd need to build a fire to keep warm which of course wouldn't be wise as fire danger is great during our long summer drought. The day we took the pictures of kites in July it really was cool. It's not unusual to have foggy overcast days in our summers or wind which can feel cold close to the ocean. Temperatures sometimes heat up a bit in the fall as Merrill in his post pointed out. But even then, most of the time it cools off in the evening. I found when I moved my Nerine under the shade of my redwoods in summer that it was too cool for them. Only a few bloomed in fall when they broke dormancy. They are much happier in the greenhouse which can heat up in summer during the daytime, but is cool in the evening. So perhaps what you need to do Jim is to bring them in the refrigerator at night and leave them out during the day in one of your shadier spots and be sure they are watered enough that those roots don't dry out. Mary Sue