Thanks to John Grimshaw for clarifying the best way to store bare Galanthus bulbs. I'll cease moistening the vermiculite as long as the bulbs have no roots when lifted. I do keep all my sale bulbs cool until shipping. Sometimes, however, particularly I think because nights are quite cool in midsummer at this elevation, certain plants (mostly amaryllids) have begun root growth by late July when I lift them, and in that case I think a faint bit of moisture is needed -- or is it? It's not unusual, e.g., for Acis autumnalis (Leucojum a.) to flower here in early August. I've been storing most of the bare bulbs in paper bags in a dim, cool room (my dining room -- no indoor dinner parties in August!), but have used thin plastic bags (not Ziploc, but the very thin kind sold as sandwich bags) for some, such as Galanthus and some of the Fritillaria species. A friend who is a very good propagator told me the thin plastic film doesn't trap quite as much moisture as thicker poly film -- is that so? The vermiculite is partly to cushion the bulbs against bruising and partly I think it will absorb any excess moisture from them. This is all intuitive, however, so it may be wrong. I have Galanthus fosteri, obtained from England many years ago, and as Mark says, it tolerates a warm, rather dry position quite well, but it also grows well in shade. (Almost all soils in my garden are fast-draining.) G. peshmenii I would say is a shade plant, but when I saw it in Turkey, it was always in extremely well-drained positions, even in the leafmold that had collected on top of a big boulder. Like another correspondent, I find that G. reginae-olgae does best with some summer water. I saw it in Greece growing in a very dim shady site in oak leafmold, among large rocks. There are a few snowdrops blooming in the garden now, somewhere under the foot of snow that fell yesterday. Jane McGary Northwestern Oregon, USA