On 9 Sep 2011, at 21:24, Michael Mace wrote: > ...the first set of species proposed for the ban last month ended up > showing a very different situation. *Every one* of the ornamental species > proposed for a ban turns out to already be present in the US; the government > just wasn't aware of it. And not just present -- in most cases the species > have been here for more than a century, distributed through nurseries and > seed exchanges, written up in books and magazines. The US government was > just looking at the wrong info sources. > > So there's a lesson here for the record-keepers in the federal government. > I've communicated with them about it, and the dialog has been very positive > (thanks to Bill Aley for setting that up). This amazes me! The Liberty Hyde Bailey Hortorium at Cornell maintains (or used to) an index of all nursery offerings in the US. And the Hortus volumes they published, most recently Hortus Third in 1976, supposedly listed all the plants in cultivation in the US at that time. Are the people drafting these regulations *that* ignorant of the field??? -- Rodger Whitlock Victoria, British Columbia, Canada