Folks, I wrote a message to the list last July summarizing the "whitelist" situation in the US. If you're new to this discussion, you might want to check it out: http://pacificbulbsociety.org/pbslist/old.php/… A couple of thoughts... I agree that the import regulations in the US are unreasonably eroding our ability to practice our hobby. And I agree that bureaucracies tend to be, well, bureaucratic. But in this particular case, I don't think we can put most of the blame for the regulations on the bureaucrats. The US Congress *ordered* the USDA to put controls on potentially invasive plants. It's written into a law. The USDA has moved slowly on implementing that law, and in many cases has tried to modify it to minimize its impact on our hobby. There have also been some amazing behind the scenes cases in which a few involved people from the gardening societies have worked with the USDA to prevent major mistakes (the save that I'm aware of was the potential banning of the entire genus Moraea from the US after Homeria was merged into Moraea). The "bureaucrats" have been listening to us (when we've bothered to lobby back) and have been trying to accommodate us. But we're late to the party, and in most cases we're getting outshouted. The people pushing the whitelist in the US are the native plant societies, some academics, and their allies like the Nature Conservancy. They are very well organized, and many of them are amazingly strident. They are the one who pushed through the original legislation requiring import restrictions, and they've been lobbying the USDA (and threatening lawsuits) trying to enact the most restrictive regulations possible. I do think we should be very careful about what we label a weed, but I don't think we need to worry too much about our wiki being used as a source for banning plants. Unfortunately, the whitelist regulations as they were being structured the last time I checked would rely on peer-reviewed scientific articles to evaluate invasiveness. That sounds like a good approach, but some of those peer-reviewed articles make scientific guesses at invasiveness by looking at factors like the native climate of a bulb and how many seeds if it sets. So if it grows in a climate similar to some part of the US, and if it sets a lot of seeds, it could be assumed to be invasive even if all of us testify that in reality it isn't. On the other hand, if a species is shown to already be present in the US, it will be exempted from the whitelist. So I think one of the most useful things we can do on the wiki is document what we're already growing here. If you live in the US and don't like the regulations, tell your congressperson, and participate in the public comment opportunities when new regulations are proposed. And if you belong to a native plant society, tell it to back off. If you don't bother to do these things, then look in a mirror before you blame anybody else for the new regulations. Mike San Jose, CA