>But, Bob, I couldn't find anything about cold inducing sprouting of Romneya. Care to point me in the right direction? The Sunset Book says it will grow in Sunset zone 13, my zone, but friends here and I have not been able to get fall-planted specimens established well enough to survive the next summer. Nor have I been able to sprout seed. Having seedlings to work with would probably be better than plants growing in a nursery gallon container half-full of pure mulch. It's obviously a bulb. There was an article in Sunset several (many?) years ago that rated Romneya hardy for all their zones, which includes me. I think it would never occur to anyone in California that there was an alternate method of germinating seeds which involved subjecting the poor things to below 0 (F) temperatures. I did skim through the paper, which is similar to the ones on arctostaphylos seed germination, except the latter suggest that it's charate, and not smoke, which induces germination. Fifteen minutes of smoke directed toward a single group of seeds seems an unlikely scenario, even in a wildfire. I germinated seeds of R. coulteri years ago, using the outdoor method, and gave the resulting plants to D(enver) BG. I'm pretty sure they lived. All subsequent efforts to establish plants here have been failures, but romneya is notoriously difficult to establish. (I've had plants die the day after being planted.) There was a discussion about germinating romneyas on a mailing list, ages ago. Because somebody, somewhere, had stated that romneyas would only germinate if smoked, then every other statement about their seed germination was obviously false. However, there was someone in Florida who wanted to try germination romneyas, decided to try freezing them, and I got an email from her a year later saying she had a bumper crop of romneyas after storing the seed in the freezer over the winter. Bob