I’ve been reading a lot lately about Lilium grayi and the efforts to protect it. The nominal species is evidently still in commerce. It occurred to me that it would make good sense to have government subsidized programs to propagate certain endangered plant species and to support their establishment as commercial crops. The chief advantage of this is that it would kill the incentives for poaching and allow the widespread distribution of germplasm. The plant loving public would get their plants, and by removing the economic incentives for poaching, the wild populations would be under much reduced pressures from collectors. It seems to me that most of the current management programs I know about have the opposite effect: they result in the concentration and localization of germplasm and they (unintentionally I’m sure) enhance the perception that the plants are worth having simply because they are rare. There is an undeniable cachet in having rare plants – newspaper articles about the cycad cult were a good exposé of this. I know some object to such an approach because it might result in the willy-nilly distribution of material which would obfuscate distribution studies. Modern technology might come to the rescue here: if records of the DNA fingerprints of the plants distributed are kept, that should obviate that objection. How do the rest of you feel about this? Jim McKenney jimmckenney@jimmckenney.com Montgomery County, Maryland, USA, USDA zone 7 My Virtual Maryland Garden http://www.jimmckenney.com/ BLOG! http://mcwort.blogspot.com/ Webmaster Potomac Valley Chapter, NARGS Editor PVC Bulletin http://www.pvcnargs.org/ Webmaster Potomac Lily Society http://www.potomaclilysociety.org/ Jim McKenney jimmckenney@jimmckenney.com Montgomery County, Maryland, USA, USDA zone 7 My Virtual Maryland Garden http://www.jimmckenney.com/ BLOG! http://mcwort.blogspot.com/ Webmaster Potomac Valley Chapter, NARGS Editor PVC Bulletin http://www.pvcnargs.org/ Webmaster Potomac Lily Society http://www.potomaclilysociety.org/