Steve, I would indeed like to trade offsets/corms/tubers sometime. Spontaneous seed on the outdoor plants would also be great. Does anyone besides Steve have some outdoor hardy Zantedeschia in their cold garden? I have 'Black Forest' which I am not yet ready tom test outdoors. It is darker than 'Black Pearl'. I raised a few Z. jucunda from seeds, and will try some of them outdoors near the greenhouse once they have made some offsets. I got several Z. pentlandii corms or tubers several years ago, and I paid a ridiculously high price for them! The first of these is blooming right now, and it is a lovely, large, well opened thing, golden yellow. I think they are now producing Z. pentlandii by tissue culture, so the commercial ones are probably all just a single clone. I have Z. albomaculata ex hort and ex seeds collected by Rod and Rachel Saunders. The wild collected seedling has a better flower than the garden plants. I'm lacking Z. rehmannii; I think I left a tray of seedlings outdoors too late one autumn. Anyone have seeds of Z. rehmannii? I think I should try some of the garden Z. albomaculata outdoors next spring. Since there are so many Zantedeschia cultivars available now, and they are beginning to be somewhat less expensive, we ought to just buy masses of them, plant everything in the garden, and a few years later lift and trade the survivors. Maybe I'll remember that early next spring..... I should have small offsets of Z. pentlandii to trade this autumn. I may have one or two offsets of Z. jucunda then too. Let's trade! Jim Shields At 12:57 PM 6/17/2006 -0500, you wrote: >On Sat, 17 Jun 2006, J.E. Shields wrote: > > > I would like to hear from folks who can grow Zantedeschia outdoors in the > > ground all year round in USDA zones 7 or colder. I'm convinced that there > > are out there somewhere some truly hardy Zantedeschia for zone 5, but I > > just have not come across them yet! Who has them? > >Jim, I've probably worn this topic out (or maybe that was on another >list), but >I'm in NW Arkansas, nominally USDA zone 6, but with winters ranging from 5 to >7 (last several were 7s, nothing below about 5 F/-15 C). > >I grow all my Zantedeschias, with 3 exceptions below, outdoors all year, no >protection. Several, including "Flame" and a small-flowered cultivar which >clearly has a lot of Z. rehmanii in it, have been out there for at least 15 >years, which includes the odd -20 F/-29 C night. Some of the newer ones, >including "Black Pearl" which went in last year, haven't been through a hard >winter yet, but broke dormancy at about the same time as the older ones. > >I'm doing what you did, plenty of water in summer and none besides what nature >provides in winter. Whatever I'm doing right, it's not calculated. I'll be >glad >to compare growing conditions, or send you some offsets of the long-term >survivors here, or seeds in late summer. > >The exceptions: I can't grow Z. aethiopica outdoors at all, even though it's >supposed to be the hardiest, due to the wildly fluctuating spring >temperatures >here. And I recently acquired two species zants from S. Africa which are >unknowns, so I won't risk them outdoors until I have enough to lose a few. > >Steve > >-- Steve Marak >-- samarak@gizmoworks.com >_______________________________________________ >pbs mailing list >pbs@lists.ibiblio.org >http://www.pacificbulbsociety.org/list.php ************************************************* Jim Shields USDA Zone 5 Shields Gardens, Ltd. P.O. Box 92 WWW: http://www.shieldsgardens.com/ Westfield, Indiana 46074, USA Tel. ++1-317-867-3344 or toll-free 1-866-449-3344 in USA