December 2024

[Carlos]

Hi again, I was puzzled by how different your plant looks from the photos of brevifolia I have seen... I asked two colleagues and it's Erica azorica, the Azorean tree heath, related toErica canariensis and Erica arborea.

Brevifolia subsp. maritima seems to occur only at the Miradouro de Alagoa.

Juniperus Alagoa - Terceira

[Wylie]

Hi again, I was puzzled by how different your plant looks from the photos of brevifolia I have seen... I asked two colleagues and it's Erica azorica, the Azorean tree heath, related toErica canariensis and Erica arborea.

Brevifolia subsp. maritima seems to occur only at the Miradouro de Alagoa.

Juniperus Alagoa - Terceira

You are right, it does look like the Erica. I was going by the photos on  Azoresbioportal | Portal da Biodiversidade dos Açores
The bark on the Juniperus looks similar.

[petershaw]

On a lighter note, received one of these as a holiday gift. (This image was taken at HD.)

[Too Many Plants!]

I just LOVE the Silver/Blue foliage on my Brunsvigia Josephinae! You can see just how glaucous it is in the one photo next to the green Amaryllis foliage.

This one is a conundrum for me...it's first flowering (last summer) got hammered pretty good, so I wonder if those flowers would appreciate some reprieve from Hot 🥵 afternoon sun. At the same time, I feel like the winter foliage would be happier in more winter full sun ☀️, which would mean even more hot summer sun...

What to do? Any input is welcome!

Merry Christmas 🎄✨

[Robert_Parks]

My evergreen Bomareas don't have an off season for blooming...4 of the 5 big ones are going off right now.

Robert
in cool damp San Francisco

[Carlos]

Narcissus calcicola. it blooms in March or April in habitat. My phone refuses to focus well on yellow flowers.

[Arnold]

Carlos

Try a dark background like a piece of black paper.

[janemcgary]

I have read that Narcissus calcicola differs from N. rupicola in having several flowers per stem, while N. rupicola has only one, like the plants in Carlos's photo. The ones I have grown for many years (a John Blanchard seed collection in the 1990s) as N. calcicola usually have three flowers per stem. Comments?

[Carlos]

Comments:

The flowers of rupicola are double in size or more, and the corona is expanded, a bit like a disk,or like a very 'open', almost convex bowl. And the leaves are thinner and not always upright, usually not so glaucous. Yes, it almost always bears only one flower, but that's not a reliable trait to tell apart nany species.

Calcicola can have 1-3 flowers, which are quite small like in scaberulus (but scaberulus has quite different leaves). These very plants were sent to me from NW Portugal (no permit needed) and some had one, others 2, and a few three flowers. Now they are in a very different climate. They normally bloom in March - April.

I have always failed in germinating rupicola, it seems that it needs a too acid substrate that I can't recreate here. For these calcicola I brought ground pink granite from a beach in the Costa Brava, 450 km to the North, and earth  + lava chippings from a beech forest on volcanic rocks at the foot of the Pyrenees, 100 km more to the NE.

But here is true rupicola:

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/213418860

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/217351187

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/232454627

A comparative plate with all Iberian Apodanthi:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/323967836_A_new_species_of_Narcissus_sect_Apodanthi_Amaryllidaceae_from_the_western_Iberian_Peninsula/figures?lo=1


It seems that some / several nurseries (Beth Chatto, etc) have been offering calcicola as rupicola.

[Uli]

My evergreen Bomareas don't have an off season for blooming...4 of the 5 big ones are going off right now.

Robert
in cool damp San Francisco

Hello Robert,

Wonderful pictures of your Bomarea...... I wish I could grow them here but several attempts failed, they cannot cope with our hot summers....
Thank you for sharing 

[Robert_Parks]

My evergreen Bomareas don't have an off season for blooming...4 of the 5 big ones are going off right now.

Hello Robert,

Wonderful pictures of your Bomarea...... I wish I could grow them here but several attempts failed, they cannot cope with our hot summers....

So you probably can't grow the cloud forest Passifloras either then. They say that cool night temperatures are ALSO needed.

It is interesting that they seem to grow and flower about the same year-round here, not minding the winter rains and temps to near freezing, while the deciduous species go dormant in mid-fall.

Robert
in damp cool San Francisco, where a big Passiflora X Oaklandia is about to get moved or removed because it is overly vigorous, requiring bimonthly trimming to keep it from blocking the driveway from the arch trellis that is threatening to collapse under the weight.

[Uli]

Hello Robert,

As much as I love Passiflora, I am limited in my choice of species. Passiflora edulis produces giant crops of delicious Maracuja fruit. I have 3 different species of the Tacsonia group which do well and cope with the hot summers but I do not have their names. Cloud forest plants are impossible here with humidity below the measurable level in summer with our hygrometers.......
Sorry about this off topic contribution.....

...... it needed some gymnastics to take this picture......

[Martin Bohnet]

Ah, bomareas - actually edulis can deal with the German summers which also can be quite hot. As they seed around quite a bit i'm experimenting with some in open ground at a protected spot - and as I'm generating data on freezing depth now (of course the light frosts until now didn't even reach 5 cm into the ground) I may find the right spot and depth for them. I always find it interesting that Anton Hofreiter, a well known German Green Party politician actually did his PhD on Bomareas. I'd love to talk to him about them, maybe he had some ideas what species could deal with our conditions. Too bad his day job circles around weapons for the Ukraine these days...

but of course no Bomarea pictures in December - so what do I have... well the Exbury Nerine shown at the end of November has changed quite a bit, but I like the "candy stripes" alot. I actually tried to cross-polinate with Strumaria prolifera

, as they are from the same sub-tribe, but I'm not sure if there's any effect - you never know with the fleshy seed amaryllis. It's a bit strange to see the prolifera pot so empty, but I hope they all flower at their new homes after EX09.

Meanwhile in the open garden, after a phase of cool grey, one sunny and windy day has mobilized the Cardiocrinum giganteum

seeds - I caught more than enough for the next exchange though. In fact I'd be more than just a little bit surprized if they would germinate anywhere in the open garden, but again I'm open for surprizes.

As I mentioned before, there were weeks of cool grey before, so I'm even more happy that a few buds of Crocus laevigatus

were still able to open - that wet mummy on the right wasn't as lucky...

[Uli]

Hello @Martin Bohnet,
Nice pictures, the glithering in the Nerine flowers shows nicely. And I like the Strumaria as well.
Do you or does anybody else know of a Bomarea with a mediterranean growth cycle, which is: dormant in summer and winter growing? That would be a candidate for my garden.....

[Robert_Parks]

Ah, bomareas - actually edulis can deal with the German summers which also can be quite hot. As they seed around quite a bit i'm experimenting with some in open ground at a protected spot - and as I'm generating data on freezing depth now (of course the light frosts until now didn't even reach 5 cm into the ground) I may find the right spot and depth for them. I always find it interesting that Anton Hofreiter, a well known German Green Party politician actually did his PhD on Bomareas. I'd love to talk to him about them, maybe he had some ideas what species could deal with our conditions. Too bad his day job circles around weapons for the Ukraine these days...

but of course no Bomarea pictures in December...

Of my Bomareas, only edulis is strongly deciduous. There are a number of others that don't grow during the winter and get ratty looking, but they stay green. There are some higher elevation dryland species that should be strongly deciduous, but might not like warm humid summers. I don't know if there are any mediterranean Bomareas, but several Alstromerias will grow on a mediterranean climate schedule, so maybe some unobtainable Chilean species?

Robert
in sunny cool damp San Francisco with some winter Tropaeolums and a Cyphia shooting up