Ellen, Good luck with the bowdenii! I've mentioned before that I played with bowdenii in the garden several years back. Partial, limited, success. I got 40 bulbs of a clone that survives the winter outdoors in the ground in Aad Koen's nursery in the Netherlands. His other clones of bowdenii did not survive outdoors over winter in his nursery. I lined them out here in the open field, and mulched them pretty well -- several inches of dead leaves and wood chips, as far as I can recall. We did not have much snow cover, but it was a wet winter. (This recitation is off the top of my head; I didn't try to find my old notes on the trial.) In the spring I found only a half-dozen bulbs still alive. I put those into pots and have kept them in a greenhouse over winter since then. These are the ones I call "Koen's Hardy" and they are much more reliable bloomers than most other strains of bowdenii I have tried. They are just not reliably hardy here, unfortunately -- 15% survival is not very good. Jim Shields in central Indiana At 07:43 AM 5/7/2011 -0400, you wrote: >OK, they're common as dirt, but I didn't believe they'd overwinter in the >ground here. However, they're leafing out vigorously now, after our typical >winter with 3 months of snow cover (December-March) followed by an atypical >April with roughly twice as much rain as usual. ........ > >Ellen > ************************************************* Jim Shields USDA Zone 5 P.O. Box 92 WWW: http://www.shieldsgardens.com/ Westfield, Indiana 46074, USA Tel. ++1-317-867-3344