Dear Tigridia lovers,
I read an old post about the need for Tigridia to have a dry winter rest. While this may be true when winters are cold, the situation here in the South American Andes is quite different. Here, Tigridia pavonia is a cloud forest plant (1500+ m in elevation, 3000+ mm annual rainfall), growing all year round with no synchronized rest periods (though individual flowering stems die back, of course). It does very well here, self-seeding into lawns and other open areas. Soil is not particularly well-drained. Bulbs always seem to be quite small, but plants are robust.
Tall bearded irises have the same behavior here. They never go dormant and they flower asynchronously. Hippeastrum do the same: asynchronous random flowering. Some of our native bulbs like Phaedranassa sp. have the same bahavior.
There is a mild "less rainy" season here in Nov-Dec, but these plants don't seem to go dormant then. Those months are still very wet here compared to most places on earth.
I am working on hybridizing these cloud forest Tigridias. Does anyone have experience crossing T vanhouttei or T augusta with T pavonia? Some past posts talked about experiments in that direction, but no results were mentioned. Anyone know where to get T augusta? Anybody have experience sending pollen through the mail?
LJost
South American cloud forest