'come to Northern California some summer for a visit and help divide it.' I would love to make that trip at the right time of year. Mary Sue, let me know what the right time in summer is. I've had this species (iriung) growing in my garden for several years, but it flowers only in midwinter to late winter. I saw it flowering in a Fort Bragg, CA yard two weeks ago. It's in a dry bed that gets only natural rainfall, among Cistus and Penstemon plants. There is coarse mulch around, but not near this plant. Here on the coast, growing in silty sand, I've learned that the summers are so dry, despite lack of many days of high heat, and with fog, that I have to treat the elevated areas in my garden like a dry rock garden, and grow either natives, which are accustomed to the summer dry, or introduced plants that can tolerate the summer dry and winter wet. Hardiness zones don't quite mesh with what survives either, as others have noted. As Roger mentioned, it's the soggy winters that usually finish off many species that are from a temperature point of view, hardy. So, curiously, this means that more than a few mediterranean climate plants do rather well here, but not all. . . As an indicator of said soggy conditions, I offer Eremurus, which I've killed so many times that I am no longer even going to try it, except in a greenhouse, perhaps, someday. Kathleen