Jim Waddick wrote > A friend just sent me a copy of this recent article "A >Morphometric Study of Species Delimitation in Sternbergia lutea >(Alliaceae, Amaryllidoideae) and its Allies S. sicula and S. >greuterian" by Ewan Gage and Paul Wilkin published in the Botanical >Journal of the Linnean Society, 2008, 158, 460-469 > "This research has highlighted a lack of distinctive >characters by which S. sicula, S. lutea and S. greuteriana can be >separated." > The authors assert all Sternbergia belong to a single species >and suggest that cultivar names be assigned to horticulturally >distinct subjects. > Doesn't fit my limited experience with a few very distinctive >bulbs. Comments ? At one time Alan Meerow was doing a DNA study of Sternbergia. Has anything come of that? I'm quite prepared to believe that S. lutea and S. sicula are just forms of one species. They are said to frequent different habitats (S. sicula in poor soils on steep slopes, and S. lutea in richer soils on ledges and in flats), but I did see S. lutea clinging to a steep slope in at least one place, and in cultivation they seem minimally distinctive. S. greuteriana is a different matter, to me, because it produces stolons from the bulb. These have even run out of the fine-mesh pot I have it in in the bulb frame, to form bulbs in the surrounding plunge medium. It also flowers well before the others. Then there is a fourth entity, which I grew from seed as S. lutea but it is apparently the very small form of that species reported from Crete. It looks like a half-sized lutea, and I'm not certain but I think it may produce stolons. It flowers later than "greuteriana" and the tepals are a different shape. All of these characteristics are the kind of thing that is important to gardeners and "traditional" botany. Since the study Jim mentions is morphometric, not genetic, it is surprising that it did not find distinctive characters. Jane McGary Northwestern Oregon, USA