Bulbs

Searching for the beautiful heirloom Mediterranean corm-forming Gladiolus Byzantinus "cruentes" summer blooming with glowing magenta flowers w/dense irislike clumps of foliage that support its heavily laden flower spikes.

All my searches for this have turned up the inferior Gladiolus Byzantinus communis which is a small, runtier form and a pale color.

Ian Young has been writing his Bulb Log diary each week since 2003 on the website of the Scottish Rock Garden Club. 

Jānis Rukšāns new book - The World of Crocuses - is  now in print  - hundreds of pages, beautiful illustrations, distribution maps -

everything Janis has learned about Crocus over  the last decades.

Lilium leichtlinii is flowering well this year

Gloriosa superba is from South Africa right through to the tropics, I believe. In northern Australia it has actually become a weed as it spreads by seed and offsets. All parts of the plant are also poisonous!

A few recent crocus in flower:

Crocus imperati (?ssp imperati)

Several trilliums (and pseudotrilliums) are coming into bloom.  They brighten our very soggy days -- since October 1, we've had rain 116 days out of 172 through today!

Pseudotrillium rivale (I'll never get used to that name!)

Last month we had the first daffodil flower for the year! It is called 'First Stanza', a cross between Narcissus elegans and N. tazetta which we got from Lawrence Trevanion in Canberra

Cyclamen rohlfsianum flowered at the beginning of February

and a week later a few more flowers emerged