I was out photographing a new plant of Sinningia speciosa ‘Carangola’ which is blooming now – this came from Plants Delight the other day and the person who picked out my plants gets a big thank you from me! I started to do a blog entry on this plant, and toyed with the idea of calling it a hardy gloxinia (it probably won’t be hardy for me in any usual sense; I suspect that it’s a zone 8 plant at best, but I won’t know until I try) and then it hit me: whatever happened to the OTHER plant called hardy gloxinia, Incarvillea delavayi? The Incarvillea is a bignoniaceous plant, the Sinningia is a gesneriad, so they are not that closely related. They really don’t look that much alike, either, but there’s no accounting for names. I was then surprised to discover that there is no wiki page for this genus. When I was a kid, during the spring big wooden crates of Incarvillea delavayi were displayed in dime stores, Sears & Roebuck stores and other unseemly places. The Incarvillea plants looked like a bunch of tan or dirty white carrots attached to a crown with a tuft of glossy green leaves. They probably weighed a pound each. They were always relatively inexpensive. If planted promptly they soon came into bloom. To my eyes, these are messy looking plants, and I never really liked them very much. But it is interesting to watch the stigma do its thing. I can only remember one occasion when I saw this plant in a local garden. And when I returned years later to see if it was still there, it was not. I was never able to keep one past the initial bloom of a new plant. I suspect that it needs a dry summer under our conditions – dry as in no water after the foliage dies down for the year. They probably rot in our summer soils. It’s been thirty or forty years since I’ve grown one, and I would like to try again. Is anyone else out there growing I. delavayi or any other species of this genus in the garden? Be sure to let me know where you are. And if you are in eastern North America and are able to keep them from year to year in the garden, I would like to know what you are doing. Jim McKenney jimmckenney@jimmckenney.com Montgomery County, Maryland, USA, 39.03871º North, 77.09829º West, USDA zone 7 My Virtual Maryland Garden http://www.jimmckenney.com/ BLOG! http://mcwort.blogspot.com/ Webmaster Potomac Valley Chapter, NARGS Editor PVC Bulletin http://www.pvcnargs.org/ Webmaster Potomac Lily Society http://www.potomaclilysociety.org/