Winters here in zone 7 Maryland can be very cold, but they are also very bright; and while there is not much blooming in the garden, the stack of seed catalogs I have is in full bloom. I depend on these seed catalogs to keep me up to date with the sometimes unfamiliar items I see in the grocery store (the ever expanding range of Asian greens in particular). Now that I’ve typed that word grocery I should point out that I don’t shop at what are literally grocery stores; I shop at typical food stores. The true grocery store almost became extinct, but exists now in the guise of those buying clubs that sell everything in month-size units. The better seed catalogs also often give me a heads-up on changes in nomenclature. This week I’ve had a thing for onions. We eat a lot of onions here. The interrelationships of the culinary onions are still being worked out, and it’s an intriguing story. Shallots, which were generally called Allium ascalonicum when I was a kid, then they went into a phase where they were called Allium cepa Aggregatum Group or something like that. Now there seems to be a trend among some to treat them as A. cepa variants and let it go at that. Because many of what are sold as shallots now are of hybrid origin (hybrid in the sense onion x shallot), maybe this makes sense. I was reading the Rix and Phillips Random House Book of Vegetables where I encountered the name Allium oschaninii in a list of wild Allium which might have contributed to the ancestry of the cultivated Allium cepa (itself unknown as a wild plant). Later I checked out the wikipedia account of shallot and was very surprised to find this: the author of that account assigns the French gray shallot (but not other shallots) to Allium oschaninii. Those who know their onions have long praised the French gray as the best of the shallots. Jim McKenney jimmckenney@jimmckenney.com Montgomery County, Maryland, USA, 39.03871º North, 77.09829º West, USDA zone 7, where it's cold and the temperature will probably not go above freezing today: early snowdrops are hunkered down. 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/