People Still Dig Protected Bulbs
Judy Glattstein (Mon, 05 Sep 2011 06:50:15 PDT)

In an e-mail from my sister in Israel:

"Pictures of blossoming squill have been featured in local newspapers
and though they are a protected plant, my dentist dug up a couple while
camping on holiday for a week with his family. He potted them in a deep
container and patients like me, gazing out the the glass door to the
balcony of his major examination room, can enjoy the thin elegant spire
that each one boasts."

I was somewhat surprised that my sister didn't say anything negative
about this. There have been other occasions when she writes of the
iniquities of taking protected plants or their seeds. Granted, back in
1973 when she and her family made aliyah and our parents visited them, a
Cyclamen persicum tuber that had fallen out of a roadside back was
brought home to me. (I still have it, significantly larger, and reliably
flowering early every winter.)

Is it O.K. to rescue such plants that fall by the wayside? Should they
be replanted into the bank, waiting for the next road crew to disinter
them again? Should such no-digging-involved, likely-to-die plants be up
for grabs? Construction and livestock are more deadly.

That same year, 1973, my husband was working in Holland. The children
and I (plus 2 cats and a dachshund) joined him for the summer. We had a
long weekend in London. I made an outing to Colonel Mars nursery in
Haslemere, and recall an absolute heap of cyclamen tubers laying on a
groundsheet next to a path. For sure they were collected material.

Trillium grandiflorum an absolute sheet of white visible from the car as
we drove along Route 80 in Ohio in early May, in the early 1980s. Not
there the next year. Ticky tacky little houses had replaced the forest.

An old USDA pamphlet on propagation / growing bulbs had directions for
raising trillium from seed with thorough, detailed instructions: sow
fresh, leaf appears 2nd year, thin out and space thus and such, space
more widely in 4th or 5th year, blooming plants in 7 years. Yup. If you
do this, and do it every year - in seven years and every year thereafter
you have sturdy, healthy, nursery raised plants. Don't sow any seeds and
in seven years you have what you started with. Nothing.