Jim McKenney wrote about a few things he has in bloom, which prompts me to comment on their behavior on the other side of the continent. After having snow on the ground for two weeks, my place is now almost snow-free and there was a warm day Saturday, which I spent working with the bulb frames and cleaning up in the hope that visitors might make it out here this winter to see the flowers. Yesterday was cooler but not pouring, so I attacked a mess of dead (I hope) blackberries, old lumber, and overgrown hollies back by the kennels, and plan to put in a group of large ornamental grasses there. The weed grass will presumably blend in with them, and if the blackberries resurge, I can use Crossbow on them without killing the grasses. (Anti-chemical folks, don't bother to scold me, please; you don't have the same problems, or very likely as much acreage.) Jim mentioned Crocus chrysanthus 'Uschak Orange', a very bright one. It has self-sown in one of my raised beds, presumably spread by ants because the seedlings are so far apart. As for his Nerine foliage looking fine in the frame, I gave up on Nerine last summer, since it never flowers here, and put the plants out in the open in a raised bed. The leaves froze and turned to mush, and I suspect the bulbs, though well mulched, are also goners. As for Jim's report of erratic flowering time of Tecophilaea, it never varies here: always in early March, with the leaves emerging barely before flowering. Possibly in his climate, the bulbs are getting too much moisture in summer? I have a lot of Tecophilaea seedlings coming on in the solarium, but I always fear they will etiolate (elongate and become weak), even under full glass as they are; this is a subalpine plant, and it seems to keep in character best if grown without any heat. The spring snowdrops here are in full bloom, but Eranthis has not emerged. On the latter, last year a couple of us who were working on the order filling of the NARGS seed exchange found that a large quantity of Eranthis hyemalis seed was left over when we were packing up the seeds to send on for the surplus distribution, so we took some home, not expecting this purportedly ephemeral seed to germinate. To our surprise, it germinated very well last month, having been planted last winter. I've always thought it worth gambling on so-called ephemeral or short-lived seeds, particularly in the Ranunculaceae, and have raised four species of Adonis to prove it. It is a little tedious to raise perennial ranunculads (if I can coin that word) from seed because they make only a pair of cotyledons the first year, in most cases, and have to be cosseted for a few years, but once mature, they tend to be long-lived. Jane McGary Northwestern Oregon, USA