New Moraea photos on wiki

Mary Sue Ittner msittner@mcn.org
Thu, 24 May 2007 14:53:26 PDT
Hi,

I've added some more pictures to the wiki Moraea pages. You can see them on:

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

There are new pictures of Moraea vegeta. One is from Alan Horstmann and 
there are habitat shots my husband and I took last September on Lion's Head 
(near Table Mountain) in the southwest Cape. This is a small brownish 
species with flowers that open for part of a day, but new ones appear over 
a period of time. It seems to be growing quite happily in my driveway and 
in a pathway where it doesn't have a lot of competition as it's not very tall.

There were already quite a number of Moraea villosa pictureson the wiki. It 
is one of the spectacular species and when you grow it from seed you get 
all kinds of fantastic variations. So I've added some that were blooming 
for me between rain storms this spring and a photo from Alan Horstmann and 
one from Bob Werra.

Also we saw some creamy orange ones growing in the ground at Kirstenbosch 
in August 2006. The Moraea book shows a beautiful orange ssp.  to tempt you 
and then writes that it isn't available. I'm not sure where the one we saw 
came from and it wasn't the bright orange in the drawing, but it was really 
pretty and I believe it was a form of M. villosa, not M. tulbaghensis.

There are pictures of two species not illustrated before on our wiki: M. 
viscaria from Cameron McMaster and M. worcesterensis from Alan Horstmann. 
Finally I added a recent picture of a Moraea I got from Bill Dijk. It was 
one he named after Zoe Carter, a New Zealand botanical artist who has done 
some wonderful paintings of bulbs (and Proteas). He always called it Moraea 
villosa 'Zoe', but when Bob Werra saw it on a visit to my garden and we 
studied it more closely we thought it had more of an affinity to Moraea 
aristata. Regardless, it is one of my favorite Moraeas and it blooms fairly 
reliably for me which is another reason to pair it with M. aristata which 
is ever expanding in my garden and a good bloomer each year. I saved some 
seed from it and am curious about what the offspring will look like when 
they finally bloom.

More to come as I have time.

Mary Sue 


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