This brings up a good point. We really need to put together a roving band of weeders to remove all of those unwanted bulbs from other locations so we can bring them back to our gardens. Boyce Tankersley Director of Living Plant Documentation Chicago Botanic Garden 1000 Lake Cook Road Glencoe, IL 60022 tel: 847-835-6841 fax: 847-835-1635 email: btankers@chicagobotanic.org -----Original Message----- From: pbs-bounces@lists.ibiblio.org [mailto:pbs-bounces@lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of totototo@telus.net Sent: Wednesday, May 23, 2007 12:27 PM To: PBS Society Subject: [pbs] Weedy Bulbs While cleaning up the garden, it struck me that some bulbous plants are very weedy, spreading overly freely by seed, offsets, or both. Different climates and different soils will have different weedy bulbs, but in my garden with its heavy, dampish soil and a cool Mediterranean climate, the worst offenders (which include a few surprises) are... Allium: A. christophii, A. karataviense, A. roseum. Brodiaea howellii This spreads like a mad thing by offsets. My form may be a sterile triploid. Another Brodiaea, possibly B. coronaria, has similar propensities to seek lebensraum. Camassia leichtlinii, both ssp. leichtlinii (the uncommon creamy- white type) and ssp. suksdorfii (violet-blue), also a commercial form I've lost the name of. Chionodoxa has a habit of turning up as single seedlings in the oddest places. As long as I round them up and put them in their corral with other small blue bulbs, they're fine, but ignore them and my garden would gradually turn into a sea of sapphire blue. Eranthis hyemalis is a prolific self-sower, but so welcome that I am reluctant to designate it as a weed. Hyancinthoides hispanica, H. non-scripta (what is the currently accepted generic name for these?) Muscari aucheri 'Blue Boy'; M. armeniacum 'Valerie Finnis', to my despair, tried to set seed this year, but I have removed the unripe capsules. Nothoscordum inodorum Ornithogalum umbellatum Oxalis oregana, both pink- & white-flowered forms, though they are not bulbs and perhaps not strictly grist for the PBS mill. The white- flowered form in is a true thug, in leafy soil spreading far and wide by thin rhizomes that look like nothing so much as pink spaghetti. Trillium rivale - the vigorous form that may, or may not, be a hybrid with T. ovatum and may or may not properly be called 'Del Norte'. [I am still stirring that pot offline, but no definite results can be announced as yet.] The difficulty is that every seed germinates! Tulipa sprengeri. I encourage this, however, scattering the seed; its bright red is very welcome in May. -- Rodger Whitlock Victoria, British Columbia, Canada Maritime Zone 8, a cool Mediterranean climate on beautiful Vancouver Island _______________________________________________ pbs mailing list pbs@lists.ibiblio.org http://www.pacificbulbsociety.org/list.php http://pacificbulbsociety.org/pbswiki/