I garden in the Kansas City Metro area adjacent to the Great Plains and

Dear PBS,

I have been growing bulbs for decades and developed some special
interest with Lycoris starting in 1989. After a few years I found the at
the Genus Ungernia is a sister Genus to Lycoris and in general lives in
steppe climate from China across to Iran with a concentration in some of
the ’stan’ countries. It was soon very evident that very few people
actually cultivate any of the species and that the literature was less than
complete on any species. See
https://pacificbulbsociety.org/pbswiki/index.php/… <
https://pacificbulbsociety.org/pbswiki/index.php/…>

Although there have been intermittent offerings of seeds and fewer
of wild collected bulbs there have been NO grand success stories. There
are some articles available on line, but they are few and sketchy.

I garden in the Kansas City Metro area adjacent to the Great
Plains and felt my conditions were akin to the great Asian steppes, but I
cannot claim any success. At best I had a few bulbs survive a few season,
but no flowerings.

I wish I had some hint of what these 10 or so species of bulbs
needed to flourish, but I have no idea. If you search Ungernia images you
will find no images with plants flowering in cultvation.

RE Josef Halda; Although we worked ’together’ on a book, Josef
tends to live a hermetic sort of life style and does not communicate
easily. I have not heard any info about his seed collection or sales for a
number of years and suspect it is due to the current difficulties of
visiting these countries and complying with modern conservation concerns.

I would love to be shown anything different, PLEASE.
Jim W.

pbs@lists.pacificbulbsociety.net> wrote:

pots (about 15in/40cm tall x 4 in/10cm x 4in/10cm square) filled with a
gritty mix, with four still small plants after 15 years from seed. I
ordered seed in the mid-2000s from Josef Halda for 4 or 5 years. They
almost never germinated. But a few did in two of those years. Southern
California is not like their native climate, but I decided to try them
because there are several tulip species that come from similar areas that
do very well here. I’m thinking our winters might resemble their springs,
and our summers might be similar—warm-to-hot and dry. But we don’t get the
subfreezing winters. Maybe they don’t need chilling hours like some of our
temperate fruit varieties that originated in those areas do. I also can’t
figure out the growing season. I put them out each early spring to get
watered. Sometimes they leaf out. One did this year. Then I back off the
water in the summer once it gets hot, then put them back where things get
watered in the fall and the weather cools down. This is when they are most
likely to leaf out. Three of them did last fall. I let them grow till early
winter (Dec.) then I put them in a completely dry area but outside in the
coldest part of the yard till early spring again. However, I have no idea
what I’m doing, and they look like they’ll take forever to get to flowering
size.

suspect he’s older now and doesn’t go to Central Asia anymore on seed
collecting expeditions. [Actually, is anyone taking the place of all the
big seed collectors from the 1980s—2000s such as the Archibalds, or Flores
and Watson, or Thad Howard?]

Paeonia. Maybe Jim knows what has become of Halda and if anyone has taken
his place in collecting seeds in that area of the world. I haven’t seen
anyone else ever offer seeds of Ungernia, but Halda sometimes offered as
many as 6 different species or unpublished species from several different
“-stan” countries and various altitudes from 3000 to 8000 ft (1000m -
2500m) a.s.l. if I recall correctly. He also offered quite the amazing
variety of seeds from a wide variety of genera including bulb genera from
mountainous areas from Central Asia all the way to the slopes of the
Himalayas in China and southeast Asia. I dabbled in a few of the other
genera but they either never germinated or only grew one season. I still
haven’t figured out the annual temperature and rainfall patterns/cycles of
that area of the world.

pbs@lists.pacificbulbsociety.net> wrote:

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