Dear Diane, After trying to identify plants in the wild in South Africa and looking at minute differences in the keys (stamens slightly exserted versus well exserted, filaments a tad longer, etc.) I started wishing some of the look alikes would be lumped together. Manning and Goldblatt seem to be eliminating a lot of subspecies classifications and I'd suspect that as you see the variations in the wild as they do since they go out a lot that it is simpler not to have a subspecies for each difference. One wonders if in some situations new species become new species so the person who names them can have their name attached to more things. I don't know who determines what you need to have a new species. Hopefully someone will respond with that. There are Lachenalias that are very difficult to distinguish and I already wrote about my struggles with white Ornithogalums. White Geissorhizas and white Hesperanthas are also a challenge. Having said that, with the South African irids it appears there are sometimes significant differences in corms and that can be the distinguishing difference which doesn't help much unless you dig it up to look. Still that's better than some of California's Alliums that you tell apart by looking at the bulb coat (if it is still there) under a microscope so you can see the patterns. Putting pictures of the organs on the wiki could be helpful to us all I think. I believe Audrey Cain who grows so many South African bulbs is photographing the organs and may even be putting them on her web site and hopefully will be sharing them with us for the wiki too. I've added some as I've had time. With Romuleas there is often a big difference. You may recall we dug up a Romulea tortuosa in Middelpos just to be sure that was what it was (and then wet it and the roots and put it back.) When Scilla was being split into multiple new genera in the last few years (and I don't know if anyone is following the new names except I do see Scilla natalensis being referred to as Merwilla these days) it seemed like the seed pods weighed heavily as a determining factor. So in that case you'd have to wait until your plants set seed to be sure. DNA is foremost to others. Maybe some day we'll have a DNA gun we can aim at a plant and get a name. As for white Hesperanthas I reported in the past that I was growing I think maybe four at least different ones from seed that all looked alike to me when they bloomed even though the name on the seed packet was different. The corms all looked alike too. Graham Duncan was speaking in the Bay Area so I took representative samples to him of each to see if he could help me. I thought they all might be H. cucullata. He seemed astounded at my request. On the other hand Rachel showed them to John Manning and he confirmed they were all H. cucullata. At least one of them was supposed to be H. falcata. All of the pictures I could find showed similar flowers of H. falcata and H. cucullata. H. falcata was supposed to be a smaller plant, but you can't tell that from a picture. The Color Encyclopedia continues to be a help (sometimes) with these situations since there is a key in the back. Once again it is lessened by leaving out winter rainfall areas considered north of the Cape. It says that H. pilosa has a scale-like leaf below the spike 3-5(-10) mm. long so if your plants are both white perhaps that would help. Mary Sue