Potted Plants: Haemanthus and Scadoxus

In the Haemanthus, the end of summer is marked by the first plooms on the red flowered Western Cape species. This year, the first to bloom is a bulb of Haemanthus namaquensis that has never flowered before. It just flowered a few days ago and is already starting to go over. The hot, humid nights are probably somewhat to blame for the short bloom period. A different bulb of namaquensis bloomed for the first time last year but is not blooming this summer. The bright scarlet red inflorescence is only about 4 inches high and 2 inches wide.

Haemanthus namaquensis

Haemanthus barkerae is often the very first of the red-flowered Western Cape species to bloom for me. It is a variable species, but the flowers are mainly a pale pink. The leaves, when they get here, vary by colony of origin from linear to sword-shaped. The inflorescence is up to 7 inches tall but only about 1½ inches wide.

Haemanthus barkerae

Haemanthus albiflos, as common in cultivation as namaquensis is rare, is also starting to bloom. This species is evergreen, with the old leaves dying as the new leaves finishing development.

Haemanthus albiflos

Scadoxus membranaceus is blooming later, and most of the flowers were in July. These probably would do better if they were not forced to go dormant in winter. I repotted these in January and February, then started watering and feeding them immediately. Several bloomed this summer; this is the last flower remaining.

Scadoxus membranaceus

Good gardening, from here in central Indiana

Jim

Potted Plants: Hymenocallis and Nerine

Now here is an interesting little item: When is "Nerine forbesii" really Nerine laticoma? I'm not sure, myself. Graham Duncan doesn't consider the name Nerine forbesii to be valid, and he doesn't include Swaziland in the range of N. laticoma. Yet the first picture below is what I received as Nerine forbesii with a provenance of Swaziland.

Nerine forbesii

Nerine laticoma from a different source looks like the following. Incidentally, this is the first time the laticoma below has ever bloomed for me. I'm trying to pollinate the forbesii with pollen from this laticoma. I have tried in past years to pollinate flowers of forbesii with fresh pollen from N. krigei and with stored pollen of N. bowdenii, both to no avail.

Nerine laticoma

They could well be two different forms of the same species. Their foliage seems to be the same, glossy green, about ¾ inch wide, and very similar in shape and length. So far, neither seems to be making offsets.

Good gardening, from here in central Indiana

Jim

Garden Plants: Lycoris

The old familiar "Naked Lady" of the Midwest is Lycoris squamigera. I never get around to photographing squamigera for some reason. We take it for granted, but it isn't really all that common anymore outside the small country towns. It is a sterile triploid, now known to be a natural hybrid between L. longituba and L. sprengeri. Of the species listed here, it is one of the earlier to bloom every summer except for the dwarf orange species, sanguinea.

Just as hardy as squamigera is Lycoris chinensis, the tall, spidery yellow species. All these plants that I grow, except for squamigera, came from the Shanghai Botanic Garden in China. They exhibit a considerable degere of variability in flower form and color. I suspect this is due to natural or accidental hybridization in the botanic garden. The chinensis vary from lemon yellow to rich buttery golden yellow in color. The form varies from narrow, ruffled, spidery petals to broader, smooth petals similar to those of longituba. It makes a strong statement in the late summer garden.

Lycoris chinensis

The large white trumpets of longituba are very elegant in the garden. They naturally vary from pure white to a very pale pink tint to a very pale yellow tint. The petals are generally smooth and flat.

Lycoris longituba

Lycoris sprengeri is smaller than chinensis and longituba. The flowers, however, have a remarkable coloration: The pink petals have an electric blue sheen at their tips!

Lycoris sprengeri

These Lycoris listed above all share a trait that lends their hardiness to them in cold climates like mine: Their leaves appear only in the spring. Otherwise hardy species like L. radiata radiata eventually waste away when grown here in the North, because their foliage always appears in the autumn. Our bitter winters then proceed to destroy it in the course of the winter. After a few years of this, the bulbs are so weakened that they disappear. Most of the Lycoris listings that we see in the mass market bulb catalogs, except for squamigera, are for similar species that leaf out in the fall and carry their leaves through the entire winter. Some of them may also have bulbs that cannot tolerate frozen ground as well. While the catalog Lycoris can do very well in the warm South, our hardy species do not grow well down there. They need the cold winter weather to signal their life cycles to proceed to dormancy and then on to leafing out in spring. Without exposure to cold temperatures, they stay stuck in their late summer post-bloom phase until they dwindle away.

Garden Plants: Crinum

There is no new bloom to report this late in the season, but there is some nice rebloom that deserves to be mentioned. Crinum variabile plants outdoors in the ground are on their third and even fourth scapes for this summer. This species blooms with the fresh flowers almost pure white. Then, as the flower ages, it develops red coloration as the flowers droop. The result is a bicolored umbel with erect fresh new white flowers above older drooping red tinged flowers. This scape, below, is just opening its first flowers, so there is no red color showing yet.

Crinum variabile

It looks as if some sort of bug has been attacking the flowers and buds of the C. variabile. I didn't find the actual culprit itself.

Crinum [variabile x bulbispermum] are also reblooming. Thanks to the bulbispermum parent, these hybrids all have red-bronze coloration on the outside of the tepals on the newly opened flowers. They seem to be as hardy as the variabile parents are. They start blooming much earlier in the season than the variabile start to bloom and then rebloom once or twice. These pictures were taken on June 24th this summer, and they show two different plants. On rebloom, the scapes tend to carry 12 to 14 flower buds. These plants are fertile, and I sib crossed some of them to produce seeds. I don't know that the F₂ will be any more interesting than these F1 plants, but perhaps a little less uniform in appearance.

Crinum [variabile x bulbispermum]

I seem to have missed the very first blooms on my Crinum carlo-schmidtii seedlings, which are growing in pots. I blame this oversight on the miserably hot and humid weather we have been having the last several weeks. I'll have to keep a better watch next season.

Good gardening, from here in central Indiana

Jim

Lontrel®

Plant and Bulb Sources

Weather and Climate

Have people stopped claiming that climate change either does not exist or is not caused by human activities? Or have I just stopped reading the rants of the crazy fringe? I have come to consider the ravings of the anti-climate change folks chiefly to be indicators of the profound weakness of the science education in our schools. Have we produced several consecutive generations of scientific ignoramuses? How unfit can you make people to live in a technological society where their very survival depends on science and technology, from energy production to agriculture to modern medicine? People who do not understand science and technology -- and by "understand" I don't mean just being able to use an iPad -- will make stupid and dangerous decisions at the ballot boxes.

Walking

Crinum Blooming

There is still a bloom on one clump of the hardy Crinum variabile, and another scape is coming up. Planting this species with Crinum bulbispermum would extend the crinum flowering season in the garden from early June to early September.

Crinum variabile

Note that the new flowers open completely white, then develop a strong pink blush as they age. It makes for a very nice bicolor effect in the garden, and on a "macro" scale easily visible from a distance.

Good gardening, from here in central Indiana

Jim

It looks like the Earth is getting warmer. We all know that plants are sensitive to temperature, so let's look at a few of the details of how plants respond to changing temperatures and why.

C₃ Plants

The notation "C₃" refers to the biochemical intermediates involved in CO₂ fixation in green plants. They use an intermediate that produces three carbon atom long products when they bind CO₂ chemically. Far and away, most of the plants in this world are using C₃ metabolism. It is the oldest metabolic route to carbon fixation. It works better in cooler climates. When the plants are grown in warmer climates, they become much less efficient; and when it is too warm for them, they tend to burn off the carbon as fast as they fix it.

C₄ and CAM Plants

These plants use C₄ intermediates, compounds that are four carbon atoms long, in binding CO₂. They tend to be more efficient than C₃ plants, and they handle warmer temperatures better. They burn off much less of the fixed carbon that they produce. There are two general types of plants here, the Crassulaceae and some of the grasses. Those grasses are very important to humanity: they include corn ("maize" if you're outside the U.S.A.) and sugar cane.

It looks like the Earth is getting warmer. We all know that plants are sensitive to temperature, and here is a note on how they are reacting.

Carbon Sink Falters

Unique Haemanthus coccineus

This one has bloomed a couple of weeks ahead of all the other coccineus the last couple of years. This year, the heat when it tried to bloom seems to have affected the coloration of the bracts. I find this oddball bloom very attractive; I just wish it would do it every year!

Haemanthus coccineus with Bicolor Bracts

I think this bicolor pattern is a thermal effect. It was very hot when this scape started trying to emerge. It was stuck half-way out of the bulb for a couple of weeks at least, and I think this was, while the hidden parts of the bracts developed the normal scarlet coloration.

Haemanthus pubescens pubescens

These bulbs came out of Rod and Rachel Saunders' yard near Cape Town. This is the first time they have bloomed. Since this is a first bloom, I expect the inflorescence to become a bit bigger in future years. The bulbs were decent sized when I received them, but they suffered several years trying to adjust to the change of hemispheres, so it has taken over 5 years for them to flower here.

Haemanthus pubescens pubescens, First Bloom

The blooms typically have 4 or 5 stout, fleshy bracts, sometimes as many as 7. The flowers are overshadowed by the longer bracts. Snijman (1984) recognized three subspecies: pubescens, leipoldtii, and arenicolus. The latter two are quite rare.

Haemanthus barkerae

Haemanthus barkerae is a member of a group of closely related species including crispus and tristis which have similar bulb structures and inflorescences. Snijman also groups namaquensis with these three species, but I have my doubts about this one. A good dose of DNA sequencing appears to be called for to sort these out. In any case, all four of these species are found only in Namaqualand and the western Karoo. Crispus has a small bright scarlet inflorescence on a very short stem; namaquensis has a large scarlet bloom that looks much like coccineus; tristus and barkerae both have light pink bracts and flowers. I still lack tristis, unfortunately; it's quite rare and possibly endangered.

Haemanthus barkerae

H. barkerae has a limited range, but still varies in leaf shape from north to south in that restricted area. I'm surprised someone hasn't split the different populations into two or three separate species. Perhaps no one dares challenge the formidable Dr. Snijman!

Haemanthus [barkerae x coccineus]

This is a cross I made myself. The resulting inflorescence is pretty close to an average between the two parental species insofar as the size and shape are concerned. The leaves tend to be examples of hybrid vigor in some cases, with the form of the barkerae leaves but much larger. They also started blooming in only 4 or 5 years instead of the 7 to 10 years their parental species take from seed to flowering -- more hybrid vigor.

Haemanthus [barkerae x coccineus]

In making this cross, I had hoped to get some of the pink color of the barkerae with the larger form of the coccineus inflorescence. So far, those hybrids that have bloomed all have form like over-sized barkerae and the scarlet color of coccineus. I judge the color pink to be recessive in the crispus group of species.

Good gardening, from here in central Indiana

Jim

We thank Mariano Saviello of Buenos Aires, Argentina, for his pictures and historical notes on Hippeastrum papilio, the "Butterfly Amaryllis."

Hippeastrum papilio

Mariano Saviello

Hippeastrum papilio (Ravenna) Van Scheepen is an endangered epiphytic species that, paradoxically, is increasingly propagated among gardeners while its natural range is degraded and diminished. Papilio is native to tropical forests of the Atlantic Coast of southern Brazil and was first scientifically collected only in the late 1960s. In the next decades, plant breeders in Holland and the United States began to develop unique hybrids that express Papilio's resistance to Hippeastrum Mosaic Virus (HMV).

In 1967, H. papilio was discovered in a garden in Santa Catarina state, southern Brazil , by Dr. Carlos A. Gómez Rupple, an Argentine collector. The species was published as Amaryllis papilio by Argentine botanist Pedro Félix Ravenna (Pierfelice Ravenna) in 1970. In 1997, Van Scheepen separated New World amaryllids (Amaryllidaceae) from African true Amaryllis and assigned the genus name Hippeastrum to the American species. Papilio was considered extinct in its natural habitat until the 1990s, when an Escondido, California plant breeder, Fred Meyer, observed it growing in tall trees in the southern Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul.

Hippeastrum papilio survives now as a population of 50 plants within a 4-square-mile patch of Atlantic Forest habitat, fragmented by roads and drains. These survivors are representatives of larger species and genus distribution. The forest's original 476,000 square miles was reduced to only 38,600 square miles, first by sugarcane and coffee plantations and later by urbanization. The original forest was about the size of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida combined. The remaining forest is smaller than Mississippi .

Hippeastrum papilio

Hippeastrum papilio

In Brazil, H. papilio blooms in October, the southern hemisphere spring, but in cultivation in the United States and Europe, Papilio may bloom at any time in late winter to early spring. The flowers will readily set seeds, but will not self-pollinate. The plant also multiplies by producing off-shoots of bulbs. Papilio is among the most vigorous of the Hippeastrum, with rapidly growing seedlings, making it an excellent parent for hybrids. However, some cross-pollination with existing hybrids sets seeds that grow vigorously at first, but abort after 28 days due to chromosome incompatibility.

Among the 80+ known Hippeastrum, many cultivated species can each be traced to only a few plants that were collected and propagated. Thus, commercial Hippeastrum producers risk loss to diseases, because only about 10% of Hippeastrum genomic diversity is present in existing cultivars. Papilio is an evergreen that does not display any symptoms of infection by Hippeastrum Mosaic Virus (HMV). Thus far, its hybrid offspring express a wide range of levels of resistance to mosaic virus.

Some bulbs of H. papilio are self fertile, and some are self sterile. Len Doran says that it was of hybrid origin and does breed true within the parameters of a species description. Some forms are green flowered with the dark red markings and others are white with red or very dark marking. In any case, it is a wonderful very easy plant to grow in pots or in the garden. It can even take some frost on the leaves in a bad winter.

Thank you, Mariano.

Good gardening, from here in central Indiana

Jim