This year plants of Allium schubertii bloomed and set seed freely. The infructescence of this plant is spectacular - some measured twenty-four inches across this year! They come on a stem which is probably not much more than a foot and a half high, and as I guess everyone knows are very decorative. I had read that these seed bearing structures dry and then become tumbleweeds in the wild. I've always gathered them long before that happens in the garden. But this year after gathering them I pushed the stems down into the dense growth of some boxwoods and left them there as decorations throughout the summer. When I came home the other day, several of them were gone. I learned something here: when they are ready to go into tumbleweed phase, the umbels separate from the stem. That leaves the basket-ball sized umbel free to roll around with out the attached stem which would throw off the balance. When dried and kept in the house for decoration, I had never known this to happen - the stem always remained attached. So there they were, the stems still stuck into the boxwoods, but the huge spherical infructescences rolling around the neighborhood. I gathered them up because I want some of the seeds. This plant has two sets of flowers: the ones on the tips of the very elongated pedicels and the other, more numerous one on much shorter pedicels forming an inner sphere about four inches or so in diameter. The flowers on the inner pedicels are bigger and handsomer than those on the long pedicels; and those inner ones seem to set more seed: totally cool plant! Jim McKenney jimmckenney@jimmckenney.com Montgomery County, Maryland, USA, 39.03871º North, 77.09829º West, USDA zone 7 My Virtual Maryland Garden http://www.jimmckenney.com/ BLOG! http://mcwort.blogspot.com/ Webmaster Potomac Valley Chapter, NARGS Editor PVC Bulletin http://www.pvcnargs.org/ Webmaster Potomac Lily Society http://www.potomaclilysociety.org/