Dionysia

[Maggi Young]

I hope you are correct, Paul.
However, I do not think that that  expedition was the only one ever to visit the area before or perhaps since. Of UK trips,  Davis was there in 1966, I think, and perhaps Paul Furse in the mid-sixties.
And there may have been others** since, even though no recognised trips have been made since 1978.




** edit - such trips may have been made by botanists outside the UK, as so many other trips to the area were.

[Dionysia]

Hi Maggi
Yes, I take your point that Wendelbo and Davis visited the gorge but they didn't collect any material. All plants in cultivation of afghanica, viscidula and microphylla are represented by single clones resulting from the GW/H expedition. The single clone of lindbergii unfortunately was soon lost. Mohammad Alam of Kabul University confirms that no botanists, even Afghan ones, have collected from the gorge for well over 30 years although he believes further exploration is long overdue. Any volunteers to brave the munitions?
Incidentally as regards cultivation advice, an article I wrote appears in the September 2008 AGS bulletin. Unfortunately seed is very difficult to come by except for involucrata which is homostylous. We don't have the right insects for reliable pollination in the UK and hand pollination is difficult and unreliable. Josef Mayr of Munich (www.rare-dionysien.de) used to sell seed but his website has not been updated for over five years and I don't know whether he is still trading, not that it was ever anything other than a pastime for him.
 

[penstemon]

It seems to me that if seeds were lodged in crevices, then downward percolation of water would dislodge them fairly quickly.....
Read the article, by the way, and I do understand plant addiction. Hyperacquisitivosus plantarum is my name for it. A pleasant affliction.
Quoting the little dionysia book, "Causes of loss have been mainly damping-off in November, during damp muggy weather when there has been little buoyancy in the atmosphere"....a weather condition I have never experienced, and can't imagine.
Yes, the Mayr website has not been updated in many years. Oh well.

[Dionysia]

Hi Bob. I like you latinisation of the condition. How I envy your lack of damp, misty autumn weather. I recently bought a Kärcher window vac to dry the inside of the greenhouse windows every morning but it is still an uphill struggle to keep the atmosphere reasonably dry and buoyant although as you will have read, desk fans do also help. I'm sure you're right that some seeds might fall for whatever reason but some clearly get trapped somehow. If you're interested in the genus I rewrote the genus on the on-line AGS encyclopedia last winter. It's hopefully more or less up to date now.

[penstemon]

I don't know; damp misty weather sounds awfully attractive. It happens here for a day, about once every ten years.
It's strange to read the cultivation information for one of my other obsessions, oncocyclus iris: "protect from rain", "protect from winter wet, "ensure good air circulation"; might as well say "protect from elephants". The oncos here probably don't even know that they're not in Turkey. (On the other hand, the list of plants ungrowable here is quite a long one.)
One of the symptoms of H.P. is wild jealousy and refusal to look at pictures or descriptions of unobtainable plants, but I'm so used to this affliction I'll have a look at your revision online.

First snowdrop of the year popping its head out of the snow.

[Lori S.]

First snowdrop of the year popping its head out of the snow.

So not exactly the coldest place on earth, then? 

[Jan]

Well grown Dionysia involucrata from Tajikistan

[penstemon]

So not exactly the coldest place on earth, then? 

Not any more. The cold spells here usually come at the end of the year. Somewhere, there's a map of North America showing when the coldest time of the year occurs, and it shows a gradual movement eastward.
I looked at the online AGS descriptions of the species in Dionysia It might have saved some typing to abbreviate "shaded limestone cliffs" to SLC. I guess I'll need to get one of those before proceeding with an expedition.
Incidentally, I probably told the story of the one experiment with dionysias here, D. aretioides, but I'll tell it again. Drilled two holes in the inward-slanting side of a trough, planted two plants, and when I checked them a couple of days later they had fallen out of the holes and died.

[Jan]

Without bemoaning the utter lack of availability of seeds of plants which would quite clearly do extremely well in the open garden here, with no interference from me, I have a question.
In the old AGS Guide, Dionysias by Grey-Wilson, there is a picture on page 59 of Dionysia lindbergii growing upside down on the roof of a cave.
How do the plants manage this? How do seeds lodge on the roof of a cave? There seems to be only one cushion on the floor of the cave, where the law of gravity would suggest there be more.

Dionysia seeds distributed by ants.

[Jan]

The question of how the seed take root on the roof of a cave is indeed a tricky one . I have a suspicion that the lack of plants on the ground could be down to one thing - collectors ! 

half the population Dionysia kossinskiy destroyed a severe drought in 1994. Preserved only tufts on the ceiling.

[Maggi Young]

half the population Dionysia kossinskiy destroyed a severe drought in 1994. Preserved only tufts on the ceiling.

A  real natural disaster in that case. 
It must be remembered that most damage is done in all places by habitat destruction by man  - sad to relate, as we hear so often with building with no thought to nature or relocations.   

[penstemon]

Dionysia seeds distributed by ants.

Ah, myrmecochory. That explains everything. The original cushions must have been on the ground.
I take special care not to kill ants in my garden.