Booksellers, was Bulb and Seed Exchange
Jane McGary (Sun, 29 Mar 2020 12:23:34 PDT)

Good of Robin Hansen to mention of Powell's Books as an online seller.
Their new-and-used inventory is huge (a full city block and three or
four floors) and their service is efficient. I always check the
extensive gardening section when going there. I should probably haul
about one-third of my plant library there and sell it, too.

However, don't bite on John Bryan's revised "Bulbs" even at half price.
I edited this book, and you won't find my name in the Acknowledgments
because I told Timber Press to leave it out. It required massive fact
checking and correction, and at the time of publication we didn't have
the resources now available. The photos are not worth the price, and
probably some of them are misidentified anyway.

If Martyn Rix's "Growing Bulbs" (different from the photo book Robin
mentioned) shows up on their list, do buy that one. I bought enough
copies of it to share from Powell's a few years ago. It is a wonderful
work for learning about how geophytes have evolved, where they grow, and
how to grow them in our gardens.

That leads me to the eternal plea for Rix to publish his monograph on
Fritillaria, which I understand is now being worked on by collaborators.
Seeds I've received as "Fritillaria sp." are flowering now, and they
look like a lot of different things, usually small, narrowly conical,
and mostly green. (Wild-collected "sp." is often F. crassifolia.) I
sometimes can find diagnostic clues in the old AGS Encyclopaedia of
Alpines, to which Rix contributed the section on Fritillaria. That
helped Mark Akimoff and me recently to ascertain that similar plants in
our collections were all F. elwesii (papillose style) and none were F.
latakiensis (glabrous style), two names often confused.

Jane McGary, Portland, Oregon, USA

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