If you are on the look out for tropical water lilies, check out ebay first, many a specialist collector lists a good range of varieties for $10, it beats scratching around resellers and nurseries very high prices for iffy plants from who knows where With a well chosen variety, a quick dash round the pond to collect a dozen vips just before the first hard frosts can be good timing. Floated in moderate to good light at room temperature through winter and vips can steadily chug tubers up to an inch in size over Winter, ideal to plant out when next Summer starts. For the geeky you can tinker with hormone stimulants for a whimsy if some varieties seem a bit stubborn or slow, though, most vips will get going in fairly plain conditions with no special equipment or pretentious gobbledygook instructions required Tina, Islamorada, Lavender Lace and Queen of Siam have picturesque juvenile foliage, make a feature of them floated in cool well lit aquaria or a favourite dish in a window for the Winter months... Its usual for indoor cultivated vips to form a decent size tuber in a couple of months which progress to sprout multiple offsets, ideal to start bold flowering positions on a three gallon pot the following Summer. Varieties so robust you can start them a month ahead of the 'usual' tropical waterlily season...

Based on information from Dr. Wilbert Hetterscheid, the top Amorphophallus expert in the world, in Amorphophallus species the "corm" is the stem tissue which is encased in the small bud at the top of the tuber full of stored food. That bud grows upward into a divided leaf and outward into roots with the tuber beneath. Although many authors use the terms bulb, corm and tuber interchangeably the only term that is truly applicable to an aroid is tuber. There was recent discussion on the International Aroid Society forum Aroid l regarding this subject and several botanists chimed in to agree the words bulb and corm should not be used. The stem is the central axis of the plant, not the support of a leaf. The support of the divided leaf on an Amorphophallus and all aroids is called the petiole. The plant actually uses the food om the tuber during the summer and is virtually always smaller at the end of the season provided it is happy. I have seen my Amorphophallus titanum tuber so tiny just after it goes dormant I thought it was about to die but the next year it has grown large again during dormancy. A corm is an underground stem to which the above-ground parts of the plant may die back in the dormant season. It often stores starch and when it regrows foliage will come from the top and roots from the base like a typical stem but there are no true examples of a corm in the aroid family. A tuber is a strongly condensed stem as well as an underground structure which is almost entirely a starch storage organ. It wouldn't be unnatural for your tubers to be smaller at the end of the growing season since the plant has been using the stored food. Unless you live in an extremely cold climate Amorphophallus konjac can easily stay in the ground year round. I leave at least 40 tubers in the ground all the time in zone 6b and they reproduce themselves every year. I've traded mail with growers as far north as Philadelphia that do the same.

I store my hardy waterlilies in the tubs they are growing in, still wet, in closed garbage bags in the basement. Cut off all of the lily pads and flower stems, and let them go dormant for the winter. There is not enough sunlight or warmth to allow them to grow and flower in the winter anyway. I open the bag once a month, if I remember it, just to exchange the air. In the spring they are starting to re-sprout new leaves, and they are ready to be divided and re-potted, fertilized, or just put directly back into the pond. They could stay out in the pond as long as they don't freeze but my pond is only 2 1/2' deep so I don't risk loosing them, and just haul them into the basement. I've wintered them over for 15 or more years this way.

Artisticcheese, my plants are in zone 9 coastal, just off the bay. Mulch will keep the ground from freezing. I learned this from a master gardener in San Antonio named Manuel Flores in 1994, when I asked for help on how to keep my bouganvilla from freezing in San Antonio, where it does freeze on a regular basis. My tropical, are in Rockport, it has only gone below 32 degrees twice in the past 19 years there. I lost all my tropical plants in 2010, so I do not want to take a chance of loosing them again, so I protect the most expensive ones. Torch lilies, exotic hibiscus, plumeria, hong kong orchids, and desert roses. I do not protect datura, brugmansia, gingers, iochroma, ti plants, variegated rubber trees, bird of paradise, bouganvilla, and a lot of other tropical plants and vines. In the spring I give the rooted cuttings to my neighbors, family, and friends. Barbra