Hi all, Brunsvigia do not seem to do well under my growing conditions, or perhaps under my style of care. So I can't really comment on them. I have not read any really recent scientific papers on the justification for submerging Amaryllidaceae into Alliaceae, so I'm just going to share my personal prejudices here, and some older references. The molecular phylogenetic trees I have looked at seem to put the two plant groups very close together. However, from my perspective, it will always remain useful to refer to a plant family composed just of the Amaryllidaceae. I'm not much interested in Allium! The clades in phylogenetic trees do not smoothly fit into a hierarchy of Order - Family - Tribe - Genus with associated super- and sub- groups. How we take various clades is therefore going to be subjective matter, and one that various committees will no doubt pontificate on from time to time. That is how the system works. Nevertheless there seem to be few if any legal penalties for ignoring the committees. Professional taxonomists, whose career advancement depends on getting along with their prominent colleagues on those committees will clearly need to pay attention. The rest of us can pick and choose what we like from this. In 1996, in TAXON, Michael Fay and Mark Chase redefined Amaryllidaceae but still kept it as a family separate from Alliaceae. [Fay & Chase, TAXON 45 : 441ff, (1996)] In 1999, Ito et al. published some work on the matK gene that supported Amaryllidaceae as monophyletic, but (in the abstract at least) did not address relationship to Alliaceae. [Ito et al., J. Plant Research, vol. 112 : pp. 207-216 (1999)] Also in 1999, Meerow et al. published a paper on Amaryllidaceae and its relation to other groups. They found that Agapanthaceae was a sister group to Amaryllidaceae, and that Alliaceae was the sister group to the Agapanthaceae-Amaryllidaceae clade. [Meerow, Fay, Guy, Li, Zaman, and Chase, AMER. J. BOTANY 86 : 1325-1345 (1999)] Since both these families are now considered to be in the order Asparagales (and I heartily agree!), and the two "families" are pretty certain to be very closely related (again I definitely agree), we just need a superfamily to include Alliaceae and Amaryllidaceae and a suborder just below Asparagales, to include the Alliaceae-superfamily with some of the other related clades in Asparagales. Then again, in October of 2007 (about 2 months ago) Alan Meerow, James Reveal, Dee Snijman, and Julie Dutilh posted a proposal to "superconserve" the name Amaryllidaceae (1805) over the name Alliaceae (1797) for a merged family to contain both groups. The proposal has been accepted for publication in TAXON, and the abstract is on-line at: http://ars.usda.gov/research/publications/… Based on Alan's 1999 paper, the Agapanthaceae would have to be included along with Amaryllidaceae in the new enlarged family, be it called Alliaceae or Amaryllidaceae. Interesting, isn't it? Jim Shields Searches done using Google Scholar at: http://scholar.google.com/scholar/… ************************************************* 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