Dear Joe, I live in an area where many Babianas can be grown in the ground and neglected. They increase and bloom well for me, at least many species from the southwestern Cape do. I do less well with species needing alkaline soil or ones from very dry climates. My experience is that they do better with deeper pots or planted out. At least I didn't get reliable blooming with most of the ones I grew in pots, six inches deep. I have nine inch deep pots in my raised beds and they are quite happy in these. I think carefully moving them might be helpful, but a gallon pot might be o.k. for young plants. People on this list from colder climates have reported in the past difficulty growing Babianas. Light frost doesn't seem to be a problem, but I don't know at what stage the cold would get them. I rarely fertilize mine so don't know if they would grow better with light fertilizing. In our Mediterranean type climate they die down in late spring/ early summer and start growing again in the fall. They are corms and don't have perennial roots. Some species seem tolerant of a little summer water. But it should be fine to move them inside and dry them out in summer. I think they would also do better in the sun although I do have a few that bloom in areas that were once sunny and are no longer because the trees are bigger. I don't think I've mentioned in awhile that there was an Ortho book , All About Bulbs, written in 1986 where they actually asked people who grew bulbs to give them advice instead of just copying from other bulbs. For each genus there was an adaptation map of the United States. Dark blue showed areas where bulbs could be naturalized with normal care. Light blue showed areas where the bulb could be grown outdoors with precautions (such as lifting and storing) and uncolored shows areas where the plant would be difficult to grow as a perennial. I suspect some of this was guesswork. Since some of the experts giving advice were from California I suspect the maps might have been more accurate for that state than for others. The map for Babiana is dark blue for coastal California and Oregon and light blue for the other parts of Oregon & California, Washington, and the southern part of the US (although the light blue extends farther north in the eastern states -- Maryland maybe-- than in the rest of the US.) So Houston is light blue. The book says Babiana can be grown in rock gardens (check), borders (check), containers (check, but I'd add deeper is better), alpine house, house, greenhouse. In my earlier bulb growing I loved this book. It didn't cost much, but was packed with useful information. In later reprints they reverted to a book that wasn't nearly as helpful as they had before this revision appeared. It's fun for me to drag it out every now and then and see how it fits with my more recent experience. If you look at the maps in order to find genera that might have species that could be grown easily outside in most of the United States according to the maps which as I say were probably best guesses in some instances you'd only find Allium, Colchicum, Crocus, Hemerocallis, Lilium, Muscari, Narcissus. The more than 100 other genera (sometimes covering only a couple species) discussed won't grow outside somewhere. On this list people often report difficulties getting Amaryllis belladonna to flower. On the map in this book it is dark blue on the western half of California, the southern parts of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia, Florida, and the coastal parts of North and South Carolina. It would seem to me that with such a world wide list it would be an interesting exercise in hardiness for people to report what was perennial where they lived. I know Jim Shields tried to get a data base started for that years ago and only a few contributed so I'm not suggesting we do this, just that it would be interesting as I suspect there would be surprises. Mary Sue