Erythronium seed dispersal
Jane McGary (Sun, 15 Mar 2015 10:53:03 PDT)

A few years ago, when I was editing the NARGS journal Rock Garden
Quarterly, I received an extremely detailed article about Erythronium
seed dispersal, much of which we published. It should be available on
the NARGS website. The article is in vol. 65, p. 265.

The gist, for this current discussion, is that western American
Erythronium species have seed dispersal by ants. As I recall, this
process is called "myrmecophory."

As Travis wrote, some Erythronium species in the wild, especially in
the Pacific Northwest, occur as scattered populations of individual
plants, presumably by seeding. I also observed this in colonies of
Erythronium japonicum in Japan. In moist woodland in the American
west and apparently in the UK, Erythronium revolutum is particularly
happy to spread in this way.

By contrast, commercial Erythronium hybrids such as 'Citronella' and
'Pagoda' have been selected for heavy offsetting of bulbs, a
characteristic apparently derived from the narrow endemic Erythronium
tuolumnense (a name I bet gets mangled in pronunciation; in the
anglicized version of the Native American name Tuolumne, the stress
accent is on the "o" and the first "e", and the "n" is elided).