Friends, Here in Kansas City it is odd timing on bulbs - still. The whole season has been odd and it feels more like fall than mid August Still the Lycoris have started, but all out of sequence with a slew of L. sanguinea blooming along with L. squamigera, L. longituba and L. chinesis. L. sanguinea usually precedes all these. And bloom so far is small, but I am sure this is due to last year's awful extended drought. But the mild winter has produced a few blooms on haywardii (early too) and some nice hybrids. The mid season sp have not yet started and no sign of later ones either. thankfully. Still sending up stalks the Crinum beds are still gorgeous. I am totally impressed with the work of our own Jay Yourch, Alani David and others (Jim Shields unseen yet) and still others (D. Lehmiller) that there is a 'New Age of Garden Crinums" in our future. These new hardy hybrids have large colorful flower, pup modestly, are perfectly hardy and have delicious scents with manageably smaller foliage. These coming hybrids will be both garden specimens, architectural statements and suited to cut flower beds. We are enjoying these greatly. Right now we have 'Imperial Guard' (17 stalks so far each with about 10 flowers over weeks of bloom), Cecil Houdyshell -still blooming too, 'Super Ellen' -lost track of stalk numbers, Glory, Persephone, x. herbertii. Plant Delights has expanded their offerings greatly and many temptations although hardiness is not certain on all these. Our continuing trials with Crocosmia seem very tempermental. Those that prosper are wonderful, but others start good and disappear without blooming. We do have temperature extremes that may bring some to sudden dry dormancy and again others are suffering from last year's drought. Still we have had a succession of bloom red, orange, yellow and in-betweens for weeks. And a final bulbous oddity. Typhonium giganteum. This is one of - maybe THE hardiest members of the genus - and one of the last to emerge in late summer. It is just fully unfolded this week. We almost always miss bloom as it proceeds foliage, but we get distracted waiting for foliage for too long. The flower is not much, but the pink-rose raspberry-like fruits are really cute. It will stay up a few weeks and then fade away for another year. All together an odd sequence and we appreciate all that do show up. Soon it will be planting time, too. Best from the Midwest Jim W. On Aug 18, 2013, at 11:09 AM, Nicholas plummer wrote: > Here in my North Carolina garden, I know Autumn is here when the Lycoris > radiata pop up. There is still no sign of them, so I'd call it Summer, > albeit an unusually cool and wet one.