Hi All, I could not agree more with what Alberto says. In my climate, anyone with my sorts of interests in tender bulbs has to use pots and has to bring them indoors for the winter. We're just today moving more of our pots into the heated storage shed and the greenhouses for the winter. Bigger pots make bigger plants, which are often more resistant to environmental stresses, which may produce more or bigger flowers, and which more nearly approximate what you would see in the wild. The garden stories about bulbs that need to be pot-bound probably come from the tendency of amateur gardeners to over-water plants from arid climates. Dutch hybrid Hippeastrum, the so-called "amaryllis" of the supermarket and garden shop, grow wonderfully outdoors in the ground during warm weather. If you can take the extra work of digging them in the autumn, they are much nicer that way than when kept in a pot all the time. Jim Shields in central Indiana (USA), where winter is a-coming in the next couple of months At 02:51 PM 10/7/2006 +0000, you wrote: >........ BUT, what the post was all about from the beginning is that what >makes pot culture insatisfactory is the bonsai effect produced by small >pots. And that by using really big containers you can mimick free range >conditions a lot. > >Best >Alberto ************************************************* 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