I don't want to repeat my entire taped rant about hardiness "zones,"
so will only note that when I lived near Estacada, in the Cascade
foothills, an area Marc Rosenblum probably knows, my home appeared to
sit on the line between Zone 8 and Zone 1 on the USDA map. Most
winters the low was around 15 F, but about every fourth winter, colder
temperatures occurred, the lowest being minus 6 F in the historic cold
snap of 1990-91, which killed even some native plants all along the
Pacific coast. My doubts expressed in an earlier post are admittedly
subjective, based on a lifetime (75 come this July) of observation
from central California to interior Alaska and 9 plant-hunting visits
to western and Andean South America, as well as 30+ years of
optimistic, experimental gardening. Unlike Hortus III and the RHS, I'm
not using statistical methods, but the book "How To Lie with
Statistics" comes to mind.

I do want to correct myself: when I wrote A. pulchella, I meant A.
psittacina, which Garak's post mentions. Also note his phrase "for
single nights," which may mean that the soil did not freeze to the
depth of the tubers or even the growing points. Like many other
geophytes, alstros can delve deeply. I once dug down to see how A.
umbellata (a snow-zone central Andean) grew, and it was underneath
about 30 cm of loose, dry talus and another 15 cm of fine, slightly
moist sand (in January, the dry southern midsummer). That leads to
another topic, the influence of rocky habitat in providing moisture to
plants in arid climates, where fog or dew condenses on the rocks and
trickles down. Whatever the books tell you, that is not "baking."

Jane McGary, Portland, Oregon, USA

On 4/29/2022 11:24 PM, Marc Rosenblum via pbs wrote:

_______________________________________________
pbs mailing list
pbs@lists.pacificbulbsociety.net
http://lists.pacificbulbsociety.net/cgi-bin/…
Unsubscribe: <mailto:pbs-unsubscribe@lists.pacificbulbsociety.net>