Ken ken ken (shakes head) ....tsk tsk. Other than the cautions about the watering and the potting soil, let's ignore everything else he said, ok? :-) Your plant holds a lot of potential! I've been given just a little piece of a dead looking rhizome and watched it develop into a beautiful plant in a short time. Please cut through some of those rhizomes to see if there is any green inside. If not, remove the dead stuff. Your plant needs to be repotted into a good, coarse potting medium in a clay pot with a drainage hole. Porosity is important. Your begonia does not need a dormant period....ever. Provide this plant with good light, proper watering, and fertilizer and watch it multiply. When it begins to become crowded in the container, just divide the plant into pieces by cutting all the way through it. This is one of the begonias grown more for the luscious foliage than flowers, though look for some pretty blooms in the spring - summer. Enjoy your plant! With some proper care, it will become a beauty.

Daniel, I have Torchlight, Summer Breeze, Montana Aureomarginata, and Abiqua Drinking Gourd (I'll have to double check ADG for identification). If you are interested in any two of those, I'd love to have GE and PG. I am on vacation and away from my computer Wed. through Sun. of this week, but I'll be around tomorrow and Monday of next week. Let me know. Greg

Last year the contributor 'dhaven' had these very good instructions : "Some varieties are very picky about growing conditions, and unless they are planted in optimum conditions, they will either remain small, or fade away and die. The best example of this I know of is Great Expectations, which also happens to be my favorite hosta. A great many people have lost this one, sometimes more than once. I have three very large mature plants, and they are the prettiest thing in the garden. It took some experimentation, but there are three things that GE absolutely must have to thrive. First, and most importantly, plant it shallowly. It's going to be a very large plant, so the natural inclination is to plant it deeply, but this will kill it faster than anything else. Plant it so shallowly you are convinced that it will tip over, and you've got it right. Secondly, it likes a lot of light. Dappled shade is ideal, but it will take several hours of direct sun, either morning or afternoon. Third, it likes a lot of water. If you give a GE all three of these things, you will increase your chances of growing it into an absolutely stunning plant. " I have two Great Expectations, and they are doing fine. Here is the one in morning sun in June 2011: Here is my other GE which gets more sun in July 2011, also some in the afternoon. It is from a different seller. There are more, smaller and brighter leaves : And here is that same sunny GE in October last year, showing new streaked foliage, figure that out : Bernd

I'm a purist about naming, so forgive me if it sounds like I'm being contentious... I'm really just trying to clarify... Halcyon is blue. When they tissue culture it, they get a lot of different sports. There are at least five yellow-centered oned, of which June, Katherine Lewis, and Paradise Joyce are the most common in gardens. June came out of Neo plants in England and is by far the most widely circulated. Katherine Lewis also came out of England and was registerd as a smaller, more compact and brighter centered plant than June. It's registration pretty much just describes it in comparison with June. (I've never grown KL) Paradise Joyce is one of Marco Fransen's early introductions (not registered... I've never asked him why he doesn't register the Paradise plants???) He did patent it. PJ comes up solid green (or almost) and its center becomes lighter as the season goes along. Marco must like it a lot - he named it for his wife. I remember a story that might illustrate why he is so fond of it... I think it is the subtlety. When we visited his place in Holland, we asked lots of questions and he was very surprised at how often we liked solid-colored plants. We were in awe of a set of Devon Green (sport of Halcyon with no wax... bright green, elegant form) in 50 gallon pots - they used these for flower shows around Europe. Marco said that Americans don't like the solid plants - they like variegated and showier ones. Europeans are more likely to enjoy the solids and subtle ones. Now to the complications. June has always looked different depending on light conditions, ranging from a center that barely turns yellow by the end of the season to plants that start out with a buttery yellow center and then go to an almost white, parchment center. But since the beginning, we've also known that June is very variable in tissue culture. Some plants are just much lighter than others. At one time, people tried to actually name four Junes with Roman numerals, primarily on how light or dark the center is. The kind-of "standard" for nursery plants of June today is a fairly bright yellow in spring and light yellow in fall - again, with light variations adding confusion. Katherine Lewis also became confused in the hosta trade. A visit to the hosta library will show you some that match the registration... lighter, smaller margins, earlier... really kind of like June Fever only with wax. Others are indistinguishable from June. I've even seen plants labeled KL that are slow to color, like PJ. Oh... let's add one more confusion. June Fever was registered as a June sport... June without the wax gene. I have heard it stated with authority more than once that the registration is wrong... that June Fever came out of Devon Green... no idea why that registration wasn't changed. So... what do we know. We know that Halcyon sported to lots of yellow-centered hostas and three of them got the names above... and that there's a lot of variation in each of those three strains. If I get a plant named June that looks more like Katherine Lewis, I'll never change that name tag to KL. It all has to do with the source chromosomes. Every major wholesaler has a source of June tissue culture plants. Most retailers are getting their Junes from those sources. I doubt that anybody is tissue culturing Katherine Lewis... there are enough plants to be split and sold for the small demand there is. Paradise Joyce is being tissue cultured, but not in nearly the quantities of June. So think of those three "sisters." We clone June a lot... but there is no way I'd call an oddball that comes from that cloning by the name of her sister... you could say that June's offspring looks just like her aunt - but since she came from different source chromosomes, I wouldn't ever say she IS her aunt. A genetic test could determine that the same exact sporting that occured in tc of Halcyon to give KL happened to occur in tc of a different plant, June... could happen... they all hark back to Halcyon... but I'm not going to be genetic testing all my odd (the trade term is "not-to-type") plants to see what they might match up with. So what do we do with all our not-true-to-type Junes? For a lot of years, the answer was obvious - name them! The sport listing shows 21 named sports... and 9 more sports of those sports... I actually enjoy these kind of plants. I label them "sport of 'xxx' " (the double quotes indicate a "use" name rather than a formal, legal name that uses single quotes for a cultivar. Sometimes when it is totally not what it was labeled, but I want to keep track of it, I've use NOT - as in "NOT Gosan Gold Midget" (one famously mislabeled batch of tc that went to market.) Sometimes I give it a use name... H. "Beverly" for example, that doesn't cross with any registered or common unregistered plant. Lin... I think both the plants in your picture are June. There is just that much variability in the tc of June... Some labs cull the plants that are darker, others just send them all out together. If you see a real June Fever there will be no doubt in your mind. With no wax, not only is the center shiny and bright - the margin is a lovely bright shiny green.