Acceptable Oxalis
Adam Fikso (Wed, 29 Apr 2009 10:16:31 PDT)

Jim: I LIKED your discourse on distinguishing bulbs from other similar
structures. I really appreciated it. Nothing else I've read has much
clarified the issue or been able to draw nice neat taxonomic lines without
falsifying or ignoring something else. This helped. It does appear that
people only know what they're talking about when they admit that they might
not. Evolution didn't happen in order to suit us.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Jim McKenney" <jimmckenney@jimmckenney.com>
To: "'Pacific Bulb Society'" <pbs@lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Wednesday, April 29, 2009 11:47 AM
Subject: Re: [pbs] Acceptable Oxalis

Dylan asked "Do any other dicots have what could be called bulbs?"

Offhand, I can think of several generally accepted examples and several
others which are more controversial - it all really depends on your
definition of bulb.

But if by "bulb" you mean something like a periodically free standing
structure made up of a central bit of apical meristem (the bud for