Hi Jacob, You are the third person this year to think they are the same company....nope, not the same and the lists are totally distinct. SI deal with mostly fairly "common" stuff or small plants of species, whereas Penroc deals with rare species or truly massive specimens of some things. For example I got some common Ammocharis coranica from Penroc, but they were 8" diameter bulbs!! Charles at Penroc can just be very slow to get back....it took me 8 months of communication before I finally got a list of plants that I could order off of....he will not send a list in general....you tell him what you want and he will let you know the exact bulbs he has....you do not buy a Gethyllis...you buy Gethyllis #1 that is 3 cm by 5 cm for a given price...each and every bulb he sells is priced individually....for the serious collector which you sound like, not for the average Joe that wants a new plant. I'll e-mail directly when I get a chance later today :o) Dan

Hey Jodi, I'm glad you like it!! These really are terribly easy to grow here in zone 6....I try not to give silly info about things like that!!! Mine are now in a mix of really good potting mix that contains virtually no peat (40%) and grit (60%) and they are overpotted to accommodate the massive root system these have......this rather small bulb is in a square plastic pot that is 7" across and 10" deep. I used to keep them somewhat underpotted in really coarse mix (more like my Brunsvigia mix), but that was way off on my part.....they like plenty of water during the summer and mine got watered most days this past summer in the mix I use now and they really took off. In the winter you just let the leaves die back and toss them in the basement (50F for me) and let them sit until next spring when you wake them back up with some water. As I said, I have had this one, plus two more really small ones for the past 4 years and have had no kills so far (probably just messed that up). I now have some really massive ones so I can not wait to see blooms with up to 50 individual flowers with a great perfume!!! I also have A. tinneana and A. nerinoides, but no blooms on those as of yet :o) Dan

Grows well enough in southern California near the coast, and not really that hard to find either, San Marcos Growers grows it, so it should be available in San Diego County's better nurseries. I'm not sure how it responds to more summer heat, it thrives in fogbelt gardens here, and is totally undemanding here in the SF East Bay. For whatever reasons it just isn't seen that often in gardens, although it has been listed in Sunset Western Gardenbook for decades. And Al, that shot is not improperly rotated, the flower buds do stick straight up before they open, perhaps a peculiarity of the genus. I could see this as being a great understory plant below Jacaranda trees, with similar blooms at the same time of year, although Jacarandas are probably another month away from blooming here, maybe even longer with how strange the spring weather has been.

Treehaus, Thanks so much for the comments. However, I have to plea ignorance even though I wish I had the comprehensive education needed to really be able to provide an accurate identification. But I am finding out as I go. Talk about groping about in the dark!! For example, I just learned that one of the images under Selaginella is actually a leafy liverwort!!! Leafy liverwort??? I only thought of Marchantia as the liverwort!!! But I am not alone as I ran across another site that was identifying a plant as a moss but showed these weird structures that mosses simply do not have. It turns out that it too is a leafy liverwort!!! Anyhow, this original webjournal is going to be torn down in time. I have set up a new website that is easier to get into and does not have the traffic that freeservers appears to have which is illustrated by its page loads that are frequently distorted to the point of illegibility. The new site is under construction but the link to it is below. Stay tuned and enjoy as I stumble my way through the taxonomy!! Here is a link that might be useful: A Selected Flora of South Africa