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I've grown peanuts in the ground and they're a kind of fun plant to grow. They do like warm weather. But they're not large plants. I'd say they're about the same general size as a bush green bean plant, maybe a little bushier. The flowers are a really nice warm buttery yellow in color. But the thing that surprised me is that the flowers don't bury themselves in the ground as I had read everywhere. The first time I tried growing them I was so disappointed when the flowers were done blooming, the flower and the flower stem wilted and completely died and fell off the plant. For every single flower! That fall when the plants died, I dug one up and dangling from nearly every plant stem was a peanut attached to it by what looked like a root, kind of like a miniature version of a banyan tree. The next year I watched carefully, and after the flower blooms and wilts, the stem falls off, and then what looks like a root starts growing downward from the point on the stem where the flower stem had been attached. This buries itself in the soil and eventually grows a peanut underground.

The person selling Worsleya seeds on eBay from Brazil sells seeds from his own plants. I do not know where he got his original mother plants, but his seeds are good and have good germination. (He does keep finding unusual cultivars of it, like a white one and a dwarf one, as well as very unusual species of Griffinia. So I suspect there is some wild collecting for mother plants.)

The problem with Worsleya is that it is a little tricky to grow well without killing it, usually in the winter when the temperatures are cool but the potting medium is too moist. Also, it needs a very well draining medium. Many Worsleya growers grow it in volcanic rock/scoria or a type of coal cinder. It wants full sunlight and heat (in the summer), but also some humidity, and in order to flower it needs the summer night time temperature to drop below 70°F/20°C. For example, although the plant grows well in Florida, it never flowers there. I had a mature plant once here in inland southern California that grew well, but never flowered until I surrounded it with a simple, small, plastic sheet "greenhouse" that I kept humidified. There is a guy down in Orange County (just south of Los Angeles) who grew several from seeds and planted them outside next to his house and they are now flowering every year. He planted them in a bed full of pumice. He is much closer to the Pacific Ocean than I am, so his humidity is higher than it is here. And California (usually) always cools off at night during the summer dropping into the 60s (°F). 

They grow on the tops of giant granitic rock mountains (Serra dos Orgãos) near Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where it rains all summer and are fully exposed to bright sunshine all the time and grow in cracks in the granite. It also drops down to 0°C or a degree or two lower a few nights during the winter.

As it turns out, the climate along the east coast of Australia seems perfect for their growth and flowering. A couple of decades ago there was a concerted effort to get seeds and bulbs of many clones spread throughout Australia (with some seeds coming from Brazil and many seeds coming from a guy in Pennsylvania who for several years brokered the sales of hundreds of seeds from a friend of his in Brazil--he was "only" charging US $2-3 per seed) to the point that now in Australia there are Worsleya bulbs being grown by quite a few people. They even have a Facebook group for it.

I've lost a mature bulb twice now, each time from too much moisture in the soil during winter.

And the flowers really are quite amazing to see in person. They have a luster that isn't quite as strong as in Nerine sarniensis

, but combined with that cool lavender-purple color, it can take your breath away. I once got to see a cluster of about 30 bulbs all in bloom one January in Brazil at the home of Mauro Peixoto who runs the Brazilplants website and has an amazing set of shade houses. There were 60 or so flowers in this clump that was just amazing to see. I couldn't stop taking pictures.

Anyway, it is not a simple-to-grow plant unless you live in Australia or the higher elevations of Eastern Brazil. (Or the mountains near Veracruz, Mexico.) Or you just happen to luck into growing it well in Pennsylvania or Orange County, California.

Quote from: CG100 on September 29, 2024, 03:20:23 AM

Quote from: Martin Bohnet on September 29, 2024, 03:04:55 AMactually, size and shape scream ×Amarine for me.

I am no huge fan of Nerine, but that looks like a very good call.

Who knows what the "Elegance" series actually are, genetically, even if carrying labels with Nerine on them.......................... Lots of possibilities.

I agree. It looks like my ×Amarine plants to me too. (Amaryllis belladonna

× Nerine, I don't know which Nerine species was used in the cross.) Especially the size.

Quote from: CG100 on September 08, 2024, 06:10:28 AMFrom the European perspective, do you ever view or are you a member of the SRGC forum? You can join without being an SRGC member.

You can read without joining and lots of European seed suppliers get mentioned over time, or just ask.

In S Africa, the "problem" will be in discovering species that are hardy significantly below freezing as their interpretation of hardy is usually not the same as yours or mine. There is also the problem of the actual source - seldom seen as seed, but one example - Boophone disticha has a large range and some areas have winter temperatures well below freezing, but are all plants, across the entire range the same?

I have spent a limited amount of time searching for seed suppliers in S America and never found any.

I have also asked around about seed suppliers from other sub-saharan countries and been told that even if anyone set up a business, they would struggle because so much of it has little or no reliable mail/shipping. (I was told that someone from RSA had set up in Botswana(? - bordering RSA), but failed due to an inability to reliably ship anything. (This is strange in some ways, as a few African countries are heavily involved in, perfectly legal, wildlife trade - birds, small mammals, invertebrates, reptiles, amphibians, fish etc. etc.)

Two sources of seeds in South America are Mauro Peixoto of Brazilplants in Brazil and Chileflora in Chile.

I have ordered and received seeds from both that were what they were labeled as. The one problem with Chileflora is that they don't respond very well to email communication. So right when I think they didn't send my order, it suddenly shows up unannounced in the mail. The seeds quantities per packet are extremely generous.

I have visited Mauro and his wonderful location several times in the past. He is incredibly knowledgeable and a very nice person. And it's a sight to see his shade houses. One time I was there when his Worsleyas were in bloom and it kind of blew me away. He had one planting outside his shade houses in a large circular concrete cylinder (maybe a meter and a half in diameter) and every bulb was in flower. There must have been 50-60 flowers. He says there is something about Brazilian law that makes it such that he can't put import permit labels on the outside of the packets, so he just ships them directly to your address and you take your chances on them not being confiscated. So that is a problem. On the other hand, Chileflora says they will use your permits and labels. I send them PDFs and then they ship it directly to me without the permits anyway.

It's fun to look through their offerings. If you join Mauro's subscription, and he can really use the help, the seeds are discounted and you get a spreadsheet emailed to you every quarter with all his currently available species.

https://www.chileflora.com/Florachilena/FloraEnglish/ESeeds.htm?G_LANG=E
http://www.brazilplants.com/Seeds.html

I bought a plant. They really do glow. Here are a couple of photos taken with my handheld phone camera (hence the blurriness).

I bought one of the petunias. They really do glow. Here are a couple of photos taken with my handheld phone camera (hence the blurriness).

Hi Chris,

I live in SoCal (Pasadena area) and grow quite a few plants from South America. Tl;dr answer is that if you water them in the summer, many of the summer-growers will actually enjoy the heat during the summer.

As others have pointed out, you need to distinguish between the summer-growers (winter dormant) and the winter-growers (summer dormant). California is one of the "mediterranean" climate areas where it rains in the winter and is dry during the summer. (The other area are middle and northern Chile, western South Africa (Cape Province), Western Australia (around Perth and south) and South Australia (around Adelaide), and the entire perimeter* of the Mediterranean Sea--the coastal area and inland maybe 100-200 km?. One odd small addition with this climate is the western slopes of Haleakala at around 3000 ft/1000 m on Maui, Hawaii. Pretty much any plant or bulb native to those areas will grow in California easily.)

In your list, there is one winter-grower, Leucocoryne. So as the descriptives above imply, it grows during our winter when it wants to be watered and is dormant during the summer when it wants to kept dry. All the others are basically summer-growers. Although I should point out that Bessera and Milla are from the monsoon areas of Mexico and so they actually don't start growing until late spring/early summer and continue into the fall. Most of the others will actually enjoy the summer heat--as long as they're watered. And they should probably be protected from too much cold winter rain if we get a really rainy winter. Not bone dry, but merely slightly moist.

And depending on the size of your balcony, and how crowded you keep it, you can grow quite the collection. A former member of PBS who used to live in Santiago, Chile had an amazing collection of almost all the native Chilean bulb species that he grew on his balcony. He did so well with them that he would sell seeds of all them every year. I was able to visit him once and he had quite the system to grow them and then protect them from too much direct sunlight during their summers.

*The "perimeter" includes Spain, the French Riviera, most of Italy, the Baltic coast, Greece including all the Greek islands, western and southern coastal Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, Jordan, the coastal areas of Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco, Cyprus, Malta, and the other Mediterranean islands (Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, the Mallorcas, etc.). But it also includes the Atlantic sides of Morocco and Portugal as well as the Canary Islands and the Azores to some extent.

H. cleo is IMO one of the easiest of the Mexican Hymenocallises to grow. And it seems to self-pollinate, and if you miss the seeds ripening, they fall off and sprout all on their own wherever they fall. I'm in the Los Angeles area, so I keep it where it gets watered all summer, since it is winter-dormant. I had a small pot of seedlings once that some animal knocked off a small table and I "lost" it among all the larger plants growing on the ground. I discovered it a couple of years later while weeding that area, and the small bulbs, many of them, were still growing leafed out with healthy bulbs in about one inch of soil since most of it got knocked out when it was knocked off the table it was on.

You're probably not still down there, but there is a native bulb, Behria tenuiflora

, that grows all over the place around the Cabo area from sea level up into the mountains. They probably don't plant them at the resorts, but I've heard from several people who've driven around there that they're not rare and have often found seeds of it on plants by the sides of the highways. Here's a map of some places where it has been found.

I turned a lot of the lumping in the 2019 paper "Generic classification of Amaryllidaceae tribe Hippeastreae" by García et al. into a cladogram so you can see what they propose based on DNA sequencing. It's actually for the tribe Hippeastreae which has the subtribes of Traubiinae and Hippeastrinae (which is where all the lumping happened, into just the Hippeastrum genus and the Zephyranthes genus). To me the most important classification in the "new" Zephyranthes genus are the subgenera--where all the information about how the Zephyranthes species are grouped is contained (and are closely related to all the old genera that these species used to belong to). I put the subgenus names in brackets. I didn't put in all the species in the Zephyranthes subgenus or the Hippeastrum subgenus because they aren't listed in the paper--and there are about 100 Hippeastrum species in the Hippeastrum subgenus and also about 100 species in the Zephyranthes subgenus. So I just put 'xxx' and 'yyy' to indicate the hundreds of different species. The paper said that there needs to be detailed DNA analysis of those two subgenera as well as the genus Phycella into which the Placea genus was subsumed to figure out how they are all interrelated or subgrouped. Finally, down at the subgenus level, I just stuck all the species in the same final set of branches because the paper didn't really show how they branched or grouped down at the final level. Hippeastreae_tribe.pdf

 

Since I have always liked the Milla clade (subsubfamily) of the Brodiaea family, I did some internet searching to try to find out what species were out there, and found more than I bargained for. Here is a summary of what I found.

The Milla clade are the Mexican genera:
Bessera
Dandya
Jaimehintonia
Milla
Petronymphe

The rest of the subfamily are the Western US genera:
Androstephium
Bloomeria 
Brodiaea 
Dichelostemma
Muilla
Triteleia
Triteleiopsis

In the past 15 years or so, there have been some new species found in this clade and a lot of DNA analysis done, which has necessitated creating a new genus, Xochiquetzallia (since all of the later found Dandya species ended up not being closely related to the first Dandya species that was found), and splitting Bessera elegans

into three separate species, and Milla biflora

into 7 separate species. (Apparently Milla biflora

has always been a problem since what was long thought to all be one species was found in a huge variety of climates and locations from the dry areas of southern Arizona all the way down through Mexico and into Guatemala, unlike all the other species in this clade, which are all fairly localized in where they're found. And when they sampled the DNA of various accessions, they kept landing all over the place in the resulting DNA "family trees" (cladograms).) The three color forms of Bessera turned out to be three separate species. (The purple one is B. ramirezii, and I think B. elegantissima is the carmine one.) I tried to put together all the cladograms I could find into one big family cladogram so you could see how they're all related to each other. But some of the papers are very recent and not everything has been DNA tested yet (like the former Milla biflora

species; I just lumped them all together).

I think this is a great idea, Jane. I would love to participate. I often have an extra bulb or two of something that might be unusual, that isn't really enough to box it up and send it to the BX. Or as you say, if someone has something I really want, and they might be willing to exchange one bulb of it for something I have that I would be willing to exchange one bulb of, that would be very desirable. Some of the things I have, I have maybe three or four of them, which isn't really enough to repot and send the one or two extras to the BX, especially since I always want to keep 2 or 3 in case one suddenly dies or something else transpires that I lose one of them (like a raccoon digging it up or overturning a pot that then sits out in the sun all day while I'm at work!). But I would be willing to give one of them up if I could get something I've been looking for for a long time. The other case I'm guilty of is having a pot full of something that I'm not sure anyone else wants, that they may have been looking for in vain for a long time.

Anyway, I like the idea.

Has anyone figured out a way to grow Hesperocallis undulata in captivity? The seeds germinate very easily and grow just fine the first year. But almost never seem to come out of dormancy the second year except for a very few. And then that's it after they go dormant again. The following year, no sprouts and no bulblets either. I've tried to mimic the kind of soil/sand they grow in. (Maybe I should have stolen some of the sand itself last time I was out there. ) And one time many years ago, during the IBS era, mature bulbs were offered for sale once when a road construction project dug through a large patch of them and an IBS member was allowed to rescue them and offered them to the membership. I got one, put it in a very well draining medium with coarse sand and pumice and only a little organic matter, planted deeply in the largest tree pot I could obtain (about 20 inches/50 cm tall with a 6 in. × 6 in./15 cm × 15 cm square top), kept it warm and dry all summer and watered it sparingly during the winter. It never sprouted, so I dried the pot out, repotted it and found the bulb was still there and healthy looking. And tried again the next winter. Still no leaves. And later after I dried it out again, I found that the bulb had rotted.

I think I read somewhere a while back that the Theodore Payne Foundation has been trying to grow it in captivity and were getting close to figuring out how to do it. I haven't heard anything since then. Maybe they've figured it out? Maybe Telos could figure it out since they figured out how to grow another different desert bulb, Calochortus kennedyi, in captivity.

So Uli. If I make it to Portugal, you'll let me see your garden?! Cool!

Yes, Diana (Telos Bulbs owner) told me that when things are in growth, they are listed as out of stock on the website. So winter growers are all out of stock right now (except for some of the Amaryllis family bulbs as Robert mentioned). They're dormant in the (northern) summer, so that's when you can order them. Summer growers are dormant now, so whatever Telos still has stock of can be ordered now. Although it's better to check earlier during each dormant season before that season's stock sells out.

And her bulbs are top notch. Plus she has this uncanny ability to sell stock of things that often are found nowhere else.