A couple of remarks: 1. About summer dryness. The writer of the gardening column in our local newspaper used to perpetuate the misunderstanding that dry means sandy soil. (She conflated well-drained with summer dry, I s'pose.) In point of fact, many geophytes needing dry summer conditions grow natively in quite heavy soils. While crocuses do not too badly on lean, sandy soils, as is obvious from some of E. A. Bowles' remarks in his remarkable "My Garden in..." trilogy, tulips and narcissus demand soils with considerably more body. Even "well drained" doesn't imply "sandy soils". My own garden is a quagmire in winter, being the former site of a small swamp, but it only takes a rather low raised bed, perhaps a foot high, to get the bulbs up and out of the squelch. 2. Mediterranean climate One easy resource for climate data is Wikipedia. The entries for many cities include tables of weather averages and extremes that can be very illuminating. For example, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/… The Victoria entry also includes a well thought out graph of the averages, though it does not display the extremes. [Secret tip: the spreadsheet programs I've worked with have all included a special graph for stock price data, and these are very well adapted to display of average & extreme weather data.] If you are perplexed by climatic data and terms like "Mediterranean climate", I can think of no better way of getting one's head around the subject than such graphical presentations for representative cities. -- Rodger Whitlock Victoria, British Columbia, Canada