Hi, Linda's mystery plant called White Star is clearly an Ornithogalum, not an Ipheion even if there is an Ipheion with that cultivar name. Besides Ipheion is South American, not South African as already mentioned. This illustrates how giving a plant for sale such a name can be really problematic for anyone who is curious about what they are purchasing. My ability to use keys has improved since my early days of growing bulbs, but I still find it a huge struggle. And as I have said before there are so many white Ornithogalums (and from other places besides Southern Africa, the supposed source of this plant) that telling them apart becomes a real test. I have created a new wiki page for the Southern African species we already had illustrated and added some more pictures of plants we saw on our trip. There are still some pictures we have of all white ones I'm struggling with and some yellow ones with green keels, and white ones with green keels, and some that may have once been Albucas and are now Ornithogalums that will need more research than I have time to do at the moment. Those of you who are better at taxonomy than I am and are more experienced in this genus and the plants from South Africa please let me know if I've gotten them wrong (Julian Slade, Rachel Saunders, and Alan Horstmann come to mind but there may be others in our group who also can help.) I've added pictures of O. multifolium, a cute tiny yellow one that I finally got to see open mid day in Namaqualand, O. pruinosum which we found growing in the rocks in what our guide told us used to be her private native garden near Kamiskroon (also Namaqualand), and O. xanthochlorum we saw growing along the road verges in Namaqualand. It was a large plant with greenish flowers. Then I added a number of new pictures of O. thyrsoides. I had Rachel and Rod Saunders help me pour over the keys to try to figure out the difference between O. conicum and O. thyrsoides while we were there and the more books we consulted the more uncertain we became. O. thyrsoides often has a dark center and O. conicum does not and they are not always found in the same part of South Africa. So Cameron McMaster's population near Napier and the population we saw near Darling are clearly O. thyrsoides. We also saw plants in great numbers blooming alongside the road in Namaqualand and not far from Vanrhysdorp. Rod and Rachel said they expected these were probably O. thyrsoides. I've included a habitat picture my husband took showing me taking a picture so you can see how it looked, so different from the green of Darling and growing in an area with not a lot of other things, not even daisies. One of the pictures shows the large bracts and another the filaments. When you use the key in the Color Encyclopedia you find that the filaments become really crucial in deciding which species it is. And reading the keys drove us to distraction. O. thyrsoides has inner filaments with broad membranous wings. O. conicum usually doesn't, but filaments that are ovate or expanded below. What is the difference between a wing and an expansion I ask? If you look at the pictures on the wiki you can decide whether these filaments have wings or are ovate and expanded. If expanded then the lower expansion is squared above and not curved inward over the ovary. I'm not sure I understand what this means so hopefully the botanists in the group can look at my pictures and tell me if these are curved inward like I think. There was another grouping we saw on our drive from Nieuwoudtville to Clanwilliam before the Biedouw Valley turnoff that I was also puzzled about. They also appear to have the broad wings. Linda I hope this will help you identify your plants. Your pictures are a little dark so I found it hard to look at them to figure out the filaments. For them to be blooming now probably means they were imported and on a Southern Hemisphere schedule unless they are summer rainfall species and someone else will have to comment on those. Usual flower time in South Africa is October to December, but this year they were obviously blooming before then. http://pacificbulbsociety.org/pbswiki/index.php/… Mary Sue