This week on Cultivating Place, we’re joined by Genny Arnold, Seed Program Manager at the Theodore Payne Foundation who speaks with us about the care and long-term keeping of our native geophytes — those coolest of plants which have an underground storage organ, like a bulb or tuber or corm, which helps them to withstand some of the planet’s harshest conditions: cold, heat, drought and dark. Or a hot dry California summer.

California is home to close to 300 species of native geophytes, many of which are now rare or endangered. This spring, after a winter of closer-to-normal rainfalls, many of our bulbs are treating us to a particularly spectacular year of bloom.