With all this talk of Lycoris, I thought I'd ask if anyone knows what the growing cycle for Ungernias in captivity should be. I'm pretty sure now that I have 3-4 year old seedlings of U. oligostroma (syn. minor), U. severzowii, and U. sp. from seeds I got from J. J. Halda. They come from pretty high elevations in Central Asia, but all the weather records I've looked at for that region bear a passing resemblance (other than the freezing cold snow-covered winters!) to the climate here in Calif., so I thought I would try them. (Hot dry rainless summers, rain and growth in the spring only after the snow melts, cool dry autumns.) So I thought I should leave them exposed to the temperatures outside in the winter but protect them completely from the rain during early and mid-winter. Then expose them to the rain starting in late winter (Feb.) and water them during the spring when they should sprout and grow. When they start to die down as it's getting hot when summer comes, I would stop all water and let them stay outdoors still, but completely dry, leaving them that way during autumn and then covering them before the first rains came again. Well, they seem to want to grow whenever they feel like it, even whether I start watering them or not. One year, one of them leafed out in the autumn and grew until mid-winter before finally dying down. (I always stop water from getting to them for a few months when they finally die down and go dormant regardless of season.) The next year a couple of them leafed out in spring as I expected and died down in early summer. Now this year, none of them leafed out during spring. But just as it was starting to warm up at the beginning of summer and I was going to check to see if the bulbs were still there, two of them leafed out, so I kept watering them and watered the third one as well. About a month later (which was a month ago) the third one leafed out. And now, here it is the hottest part of the summer and they're all leafed out and apparently doing fine. (I do have them on the east side of my house where they only get the cooler morning sun.) And they do seem to be getting marginally larger leaved each time they leaf out. So do any of the experts (Are there such things as Ungernia experts?) have any good suggestions about how I can be a little more certain I'm not going to cause them to rot to death by applying water at the wrong season? Because I can't figure them out. I've got them growing in small but relatively long deep pots (10 cm x 10 cm x 20 cm deep) in sandy gravelly soil with lots of drainage and they seem to like it, and I feed them with a slow release fertilizer shortly after the leaves first appear. --Lee Poulsen Pasadena, California, USA - USDA Zone 10a