Calochortus
Mary Sue Ittner (Wed, 07 Jun 2006 22:27:46 PDT)

Although many of the dry climate Calochortus that I grow did not fare very
well this year with our continual abundant rainfall, I've been having some
really nice blooms of some of the others. Many of the ones I grow are
probably really Mariposa hybrids grown from open pollinated seed.
Calochortus flowers are so amazing that you just want to photograph them
over and over. I can see that some species are very well represented on our
wiki Calochortus page. And I just added a few more of Calochortus tolmiei
that I took in the last week or so even though we already have some
gorgeous pictures of this species.

On our flower trip this spring we saw Calochortus monophyllus in Butte
county blooming along side the road. We stopped to photograph an Iris and
this was a bonus. It was different than the one I flowered in cultivation
(and may have lost) as it has red spots. It is wonderfully hairy. I've
added pictures of it taken in the wild.

Finally blooming from seed for the first time for me this year is
Calochortus syntrophus, a species discovered by Frank Callahan in 1993 in
Shasta County. It is similar to C. superbus, but very different too and
growing in that county in a different habitat. The Robinetts collected a
few seeds to share with members of the Calochortus Society in a year where
they were a lot of flowers and mine have bloomed. I was reading about it in
an old issue of Mariposa and see that it grows in an area of high rainfall
so that's probably why I haven't lost it. I had two bloom this year. The
flower of one was about a quarter the size of the other. It will be
interesting to see if it returns if this holds true in later years as the
difference in size of the flowers was so dramatic. I've added pictures of
it too (one of them was being pollinated at the time.)

http://pacificbulbsociety.com/pbswiki/index.php/…

Mary Sue

Mary Sue Ittner
California's North Coast
Wet mild winters with occasional frost
Dry mild summers