On 22 Jun 2011, at 18:21, Kathleen Sayce wrote: > I know Anemone blanda is considered an easy bulb to grow. But not for me: I've > managed to kill it off more times than I can recall, so I want to know who grows > it successfully, year after year, and the details of the conditions in your > garden, please. Anemone blanda is a very successful plant in my gardeen here at Victoria, BC. Though my place is a squelchy quagmire in the winter, this charming little spring flower flowers well every spring and increasing with reasonable freedom. Even the various cultivars, which can be tricky to keep going, do well. I'm thinking particularly of the bright magenta 'Radar' and the white-with-blue- reverse 'Scythinica'. My soil is fairly heavy, though for some mysterious reason it is not sticky when wet. Anemone blanda is a Greek plant and this might lead you to thinking that lime is essential, but I rarely apply lime to my garden yet the anemone thrives. According to various online resources, Aberdeen, Washington (the nearest town to Willapa Bay) gets abt 85" of rain a year, while Victoria gets under 25" in town. (Abt 35" at Victoria Airport, whence most weather data for Victoria is derived.) IOW, you get something like 3 or 4 times as much rainfall as I do. That is probably the key difference. If you are damned and determined to grow Anemone blanda, I suggest the following tactics: 1. Soak the dry tubers in water for a few days after receiving them, until they have plumped up. 2. Plant in as well-drained and sunny a location as you have, as soon as possible in the fall, and water in well, *once*. 3. Put something over the planting for the winter to keep the rain off. An old- fashioned barn cloche would be ideal, but afaik they are no longer made and probably unobtainable. The soil will still be damp during the winter, but at least not soaking wet. (Google images offers photos of barn cloches, in case you don't know what they look like.) 4. Take your rain guard off in the early spring when the foliage begins to emerge, then put it back after the foliage fades in late spring. You get significant summer rainfall and you want to keep the tubers as dry as possible then. An alternate strategy would be to grow it on the sunny side of a conifer that will suck the soil nearly dry even in the winter. You may also want to consider lifting the tubers when the foliage begins to die back and storing them dry in paper bags for the summer, replanting around Labour Day. This is a lot of trouble, admittedly, but such is life when one attempts to grow plants that are fundamentally unsuited to one's climate. Scilla peruviana presents similar problems. I've read complaints from folks living in Vancouver BC that while it grows for them, it doesn't flower. In my own garden, it thrives and flowers beautifully with no special treatment. I plant it not too far from the south wall of my house, which gives it a modicum of shelter from the worst of winter cold and slightly better drainage than out in the open garden. Again, the problem is likely that Vancouver gets too much rain, though it may be summer rainfall that keeps the soil too cool for proper ripening of the bulbs. -- Rodger Whitlock Victoria, British Columbia, Canada