Galanthus requirements
Jane McGary (Mon, 28 Jan 2008 10:29:07 PST)

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