Stop press: Turkish Chionodoxa exposed!

“The Bulb Book” is a photographic guide to over 800 hardy bulbs (and attendant plants), compiled by Martyn Rix, Roger Phillips and Brian Mathew. All bulbs are hardy enough to grow outdoors in North-West Europe (read: in rainy Little England).

The work is intended as an overview, not an exhaustive study. The species presentations are short, vernacular names few. The colour plates show both collected specimens and garden plants. Some photos were taken in the wild. There is even a dramatic photo captioned “Collecting bulbs in Kurdistan in 1965”. It turns out that the hardy bulbs come from Mediterranean-type climates, most of them from southern Europe, North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia. Apart from wild-growing bulbous plants, the book shows tulip and daffodil cultivars.

A few plants stand out. “Cyclamen libanoticum” is a very rare cyclamen, and only grows in the mountains east of Beirut in Lebanon. At one point, it was believed to be extinct in the wild! The immense specialized knowledge of the authors shines through in sentences like this one: “The nomenclature of Turkish Chionodoxa is very confused, and most of the stocks in commerce are wrongly named”. Thanks for pointing this out, guys. I will keep to the cyclamens in the future, LOL.

Not sure how to rate the mother of all bulb books, but I suppose four stars might do the trick…