I've had numerous private requests to write about our trip so am responding to those. There are a number of members of our list who also visited South Africa for either the IBSA symposium and the Clivia conference and they are invited to share their experiences too. I plan to write this in 4 parts: two on the IBSA Symposium, one on Middlepos, and last on the rest of our trip. I'm not sure how quickly I'll get this done. The IBSA symposium was five days. We arrived Sunday afternoon and that first day was spent figuring out our accommodation and greeting old friends and making new ones. Some of us had already had a chance to do that on Saturday when we attended the monthly IBSA meeting in Cape Town. I've always been envious when I read the secretary's report of the monthly meeting when they have a program and a plant display when members bring in plants they are growing that are in bloom. At last we got to go to one of them. Rod Saunders showed slides of Middlepos in a good year to get those of us who were planning to go there as a group in the anticipation mode. I'm seen many of Rod's slide shows in the past and they are first rate and this was not an exception. There was a break for goodies and then Alan Horstmann talked about the plants on display. There were so many beautiful plants that members were growing and had brought to show. This was marvelous and I hope the IBSA South African members truly appreciate how lucky they are that Alan does this for them as he picks up plants and gives you lots of background information about them such as where they grow, how they are pollinated, and challenges they all have growing them. For instance this day he talked about Gladiolus caryophyllaceus which has become a weed in Western Australia, but southwestern Cape members have difficulty keeping in cultivation. Seed germinates, but plants dwindle. Even if they start seed collected from Australia this happens. So the person who brought the plant was commended and there was a discussion of what it might need that they weren't able to provide. There was also a plant that looked like Babiana rubrocyanea to me and Alan told us that it was really Babiana regia which is set to be sunk into Babiana stricta as Babiana stricta var. regia. We later saw this plant in the wild so I'll be adding pictures to the wiki eventually and you will see how similar they are. And he commented on the glorious form of Moraea tulbaghensis that was on display. See http://pacificbulbsociety.org/pbswiki/index.php/… to see this gold flower with lovely blue markings. On Monday the talks started. There were two days of talks with two nightly programs that some of us attended as well. I'll just briefly tell you about the talks in no particular order. This time there were only two talks about specific genera, one on Geophytic Pelargoniums given with great flair by Robin Jangle who talked about Gethyllis at the last Symposium and the other on Moraeas given by our own Bob Werra who as he said in his talk is Mad about Moraeas. Bob gave us a nice hand written handout about the species he has grown separating them by whether they bloom for only a day or for a few days or are the "peacock" varieties with comments and giving his rating for beauty, ease, and whether they produce cormlets and seeds. There were a couple of talks that focused on breeding. Andy Hackland is breeding Ornithogalum, Robyn McKenzie is working on Eucomis, and John Pilbeam & Anthony Hamilton from the UK, Gladiolus. I just put some pictures on the wiki of Ornithogalum maculatum that we saw in Andy's greenhouses growing in mass and there are pictures of some of his hybrids on the Ornithogalum wiki page from our last trip too. (And while I was at it I added some Ornithogalum maculatum we saw in Namaqualand too. I have poor luck with Ornithogalums, but seeing this one in mass really makes you want it!) http://pacificbulbsociety.org/index.php/… Aart van Voorst from the Netherlands who is a horticulturalist in his day job is trying to introduce polyploidy in Haemanthus breeding as a hobby. We were all impressed with his slide where he showed how he had made sure that no insect was going to pollinate the Haemanthus he was working on. For those of you unfamiliar with Haemanthus, he had his work cut out for him as each flowering stalk has a lot of flowers. There were talks on cultivation. Gordon Summerfield gave a brief talk on his discovery that the ph of his potting soil was very important as some species needed acid soil. Others grow in limey soil and this illustrated the need to know more about where the plants come from. Peter Knippels from the Netherlands who had written a book about how he grew South African bulbs indoors a number of years ago now told us the techniques he was using for growing the bulbs outdoors in spite of his climate and finding he could do it. I might add he mulches heavily and grows a lot of summer rainfall species that are hardier than some of the winter rainfall ones. But it still shows that it is worth trying some things you think might not be possible. David Victor from our list talked about his experiences growing bulbs in the UK. He mostly grows in greenhouses and focused on Pelargoniums, but showed us some pictures of other things including some Irids he announced he had given away as he wants to concentrate on Amaryllids. I talked a little about how I grow South African bulbs in California and gave a slide show of bulbs blooming in my garden by month. Liesel van der Walt gave a very interesting talk on bulbs for display in the garden. She works at Kirstenbosch and is in charge of making the garden look good for visitors year round. She sometimes uses containers that can be placed attractively in the ground or otherwise and also will plant more than one kind of plant in an area so that one will take over when the other is finished. We learned about the indigenous bulbs that are used in traditional medicine and therefore in danger of being lost in the wild when Cameron McMaster presented a program from Tony Dold and then we learned from Ismail Ebrahim how they are keeping track of the status of bulbs and how many of them that were abundant at one time are sadly now red listed or threatened. Luise Ehrich from Germany presented a paper of research she has done on trying to turn around some bulbs so they can be sold in Germany during the dark and gloomy months. The plants she was working with were Babiana hybrids, Freesia laxa, Sparaxis hybrids, Tritonia deusta, and Tritonia securigera. She would get them from South Africa when they were dormant and then put them into storage and use temperature to hold them and bring them into bloom for the market in September to January. This wasn't about adding them permanently to your garden, but just a nice pot plant to bring home and admire and throw out afterwards. What struck me about her talk was how little some of us who are eager to grow bulbs know about plant physiology. John Manning gave a lecture on the pollination biology of South African Iridaceae. There are a huge number of genera in this family found in South Africa and a lot of them have quite a number of species as well. He talked about how some pollinators are attracted by the pollen and some by the nectar. The Irids are pollinated by long tongued flies, beetles, moths, butterflies, birds, and wasps. Some plants have only one kind of pollinator and others more than one. Looking at the flower you may be able to predict what will pollinate it. And when the species bloom may also be determined by what pollinates them as some pollinators will not be out until the temperatures are warmer. Eric Harley gave a talk on how DNA analysis is influencing our knowledge of taxonomy and evolution. To Eric's credit he is able to present complex information that some of us may not understand clearly. But there still were comments from a number of delegates that they didn't totally understand. I felt like it was a good start. Maybe if his paper is published in the Bulletin a second reading will get me farther. Finally Cameron McMaster showed pictures of his botanical tours of the Eastern Cape so we got to see Tony Avent and Ellen Hornig in pictures and see where they went on their adventures. One night there was wine tasting and a dinner at a winery, one night there was a barbecue for all the meat lovers and the other two nights there were programs. Harold Koopwitz showed pictures and gave an amusing talk about his adventures plant collecting in Crete and Alan Horstmann presented a multimedia slide show another night. This show was a series of close ups of the inner markings of some gorgeous bulbs he grows. He showed different forms of the same species which is so valuable since we all assume that a species looks just like the picture in our book and in nature there is great variability. In my next post I'll write about the days in the field, but I want to add some pictures to the wiki first. Mary Sue