Seeing a number of the Romuleas in bloom today reminded me of our wonderful IBSA trip to Middelpos after the IBSA Symposium in September 2006 as this area is a wonderful area to see Romuleas. The area near Sutherland is one of the colder winter rainfall parts of South Africa and I think some of you wondering about pushing the hardiness limits of South Africa species should be thinking of plants from this area. I often wished there was a field guide for this area. I created a wiki page so I could add pictures of some of the plants we saw and have slowly been adding pictures my husband and I took and some from a CD Cameron sent me of plants photographed in other years. We saw some masses of Romulea flowers on this trip; Romulea diversiformis was one of them and R. kombergensis was another. Other standouts were R. tetragona, R. unifolia, R. monadelpha, and R. subfistulosa. I'm afraid the photographs don't do them justice. I've added some pictures of a few of the ones that were not the usual color just to show you the variations you can find in the wild. One of the highlights of our visit was seeing Daubenya aurea (red version). Once again I'm not sure our pictures show how gorgeous it was. Although I still have a few more pictures to add, those of you who have not discovered this wiki page may be interested in seeing some of the wonderful bulbs that grow in the Roggeveld. I've struggled over the Moraea (Homeria subgroup) species. I think we saw Moraea miniata and Moraea bifida. The first has 2 or 3 leaves and the second one. I've looked and looked over the other species that could have been there getting more and more confused over whether claws are clasping, short, ascending, diverging, etc. If anyone can explain this to me I'd be really grateful. I just identified some as Moraea sp. and would be happy to change any that seem wrong. There was one pale yellow one that had multiple petals, no doubt an aberration, but pretty just the same. There were roadside areas near Middelpos where there were thousands and thousands of these Moraea (Homeria sub) plants, both yellow and apricot-orange ones. You could understand why people worry about them becoming weedy and if they are also toxic to stock, that's probably a good reason why the South African members of our group didn't seem very interested in them. I'm not sure what happened to Moraea odorata in the Color Encyclopedia of Cape Bulbs. It isn't included and my Nieuwoudtville field guide says it is similar to M. bifida but the flowers are pale yellow and the anthers are enclosed in the cup. The picture doesn't help much, but it is also listed as endemic so perhaps it doesn't extend to Middelpos. But it does grow in the kind of soils we saw near Middelpos. http://pacificbulbsociety.org/pbswiki/index.php/… There are a number of members of our list who were taking pictures on this Middelpos trip and I'd love to have you supplement what I've added. Mary Sue