I haven't been there when every bulb bloomed around the Mediterranean, but I lived in S Spain for a year and I have dropped down in Turkey and Greece when bulbs hard to grow in winter rain were blooming. I observed that these bulbs were either out in fields, surviving on human intervention, or under maquis -- that is, under coarse, doughty shrubs which both shaded them and sucked up water that might have harmed them in dormancy. The notion of groundcover doesn't come into it. The ground when the bulbs have gone is flat, adobe-like, even summer desert. Paige Woodward paige@hillkeep.ca http://www.hillkeep.ca/