Hi, For Carolyn in Tasmania and anyone else interested I've added some more Moraea pictures to the wiki. Actually I got a little carried away in adding pictures of plants we saw in the wild in September. One of the things that has impressed me when you start looking in the wild is the great variation you see in species. It's rare that they match the pictures in your books. In areas where there are species that are not the same colors you may get combinations of those colors that also don't match the descriptions in the books. So in a few instances I included some of the diversity. So here's what's new in: http://pacificbulbsociety.org/pbswiki/index.php/… Moraea caeca -- new species illustrated courtesy of Alan Horstmann Moraea calcicola -- new picture from Alan Horstmann Moraea falcifolia -- new species illustrated courtesy of Audrey Cain and Rod Saunders, Silverhill Seeds Moraea fugax -- Here's the first place I got carried away. Jim McKenney fairly recently moaned about Moraea sisyrinchium which opens mid day or later and closes later in the day. If you aren't home you don't see it and even if you are home you have to be looking at the right time. A lot of Moraeas are like this and are called fugacious or short lived. Some of them continue to bloom off and on for another 4 or 5 week once they start, but each flower is open only briefly. Moraea fugax is one of those species. Hence the name. Flowers open around noon (if the weather is warm enough) or later and are gone by sunset. In spite of that we saw it many times on our trip in many different locations. So I first added a yellow one from Namaqualand and a white one we saw driving from Nieuwoudtville to Clanwilliam. Most of the ones we saw have moderately large flowers making them easier to spot. We went with Rod and Rachel Saunders to Bainskloof and late in the day near some wonderful Kniphofia blooming wonderfully after a fire some time before there were a lot of M. fugax. According to the Moraea book (The Moraeas of Southern Africa, Peter Goldblatt) chromosomal variation is particularly extensive in the large subspecies, fugax. Flowers are yellow, blue or white. Usually there is just one color in an area and he writes: "there is no recorded intrapopulational variation for flower color." However if you look at my pictures from Bainskloof you will see purple blue flowers with blue crests and white spotted yellow nectar guides, lighter purple blue flowers with blue crests and pale yellow marked with darker yellow nectar guides, creamy white with light yellow crests and light yellow nectar guides, creamy white with light blue crests and dark yellow marked gold nectar guides, and creamy white with white crests and white nectar guides marked with gold and darker yellow. It was reminiscent of the interesting combinations of M. papilionacea. In Namaqualand we saw white flowers of subspecies fugax and of a subspecies described in the Moraea book as subspecies filicaulis. The latter is much smaller and has two filiform leaves. Subspecies fugax usually just has one long, trailing, channeled and linear leaf and the flowers are larger. So I added a number of pictures of this smaller subspecies that include the plant and the leaves so you can tell them apart. Finally we arrived at a population of subspecies fugax not yet open and watched them "pop". We wished we could film it happening, in time release photographs, but the best we could do was to show the bud and have a series of pictures as the flowers opened. The amazing thing was that minutes after the flowers finally opened there was already a pollinator. There is also a picture of the seed pods and some old flowers so you can see what it looks like if you missed the flower when it bloomed. Moraea gawleri - The next excess of pictures I added were pictures of M. gawleri. This is a much smaller flowered species, branched, and one that I found quite charming on earlier trips, but haven't found I could grow so it has become somewhat less charming in my mind so I won't feel bad about this. I've added some color variations to the wiki including the attractive brick red form. Since even in the same area there was variation in color (shown in the Clanwilliam pictures) I think it would be very difficult for you to be sure that seedlings would necessarily end up the color you want. How you'd ever mark them for the right color if you came back to collect when the flowers are so small I can't imagine. But since I have no survivors from seed I've tried I haven't had to worry about what color they turned out to be. Moraea gigandra-- another photo added from Alan Horstmann. I promise to be more moderate on the next page. Mary Sue