Androcymbium gramineum

[BULBISSIME]

Darren, I TOTALLY AGREE with you !
it's impossible to define a single rule to grow and rest bulbs.
would be too easy... and boring 

[Darren]

Darren, I TOTALLY AGREE with you !
it's impossible to define a single rule to grow and rest bulbs.
would be too easy... and boring 

Exactly! Half the fun is working out how to persuade the awkward ones to grow and flower 

[Gerry Webster]

.......The only useful guideline is to know your plants and the conditions they grow in in nature.

Hmmm - OK, but the guidelines are not always too easy to interpret. Take Crocus robertianus - a plant which I have found difficult. Mathew (p66) describes it as growing “in semi-shade......between and at the edges of deciduous.......scrub. The soil is a  sandstone-shale, rather moist from the autumn to late spring and then becoming rather dry but never hot and sunbaked.”

I took this to mean a  dry but relatively cool summer in the shade. Following this regime, I lost many plants over the years (not "fun" at all). More recently I have had more success by  keeping them outside all the time so they  receive whatever the local weather delivers.

How would you interpret Mathew’s description of the natural conditions?

[Maggi Young]

 Knowing the conditions pertaining to the wild habitat of any plant is interesting, but  this is not always the key to success in cultivation. Whether growing plants out of doors or under glass, outwith their natural surroundings it is unlikely that one will ever be able to successfully imitiate their home life. There are just too many variables... it is nearly always a question of trial and error... the fun comes when one doesn't make too many errors! 

[Darren]

Which is why I used the word guideline

The classic example where this fails would be to try to grow american frits by trying to recreate their sticky adobe clay in a pot. In fact I fell foul of a similar mistake when trying to grow Hesperantha vaginata too wet in winter - it also inhabits sticky clay in the wild. I found it very prone to rotting at the neck even in a well drained loam mix in a plastic pot. Putting it in a plunged clay pot and keeping it much drier was the answer.

I lost many arisaema by following the book advice 'dry in winter to avoid rotting'....  Again - a generalisation - and in this case the advice was then re-interpreted in the light of experience (dry means drier - not bone dry).

Based on your experience Gerry I think the key word in the Mathew advice is 'rather' - i.e. no extremes. Though without your experience I would have interpreted it exactly as you did.

[Paul T]

I'm actually quite dreadful to my plants.... I keep them totally illiterate and don't let them NEAR my gardening books.  It is amazing what plants will take when you don't let them near litterature that tells them they shouldn't grow in a given area.  My Beaugainvillea, for example, would NEVER survive here if it knew it wasn't supposed to.