I don’t have an answer to Jane’s question below, but instead another question. Why is it that some high altitude bulbs can adapt so well to low altitudes and quite different climates? Tecophilaea cyanocrocus grows at 3000m/10,000ft in the Andes of Chile. I suspect that they are covered with snow during the winter. And yet they grow fantastically easily for me here at basically 1/10 of that altitude in a mediterranean climate where we never get snow and only rare does it ever go below freezing. And here they act just like Cape bulbs from the southwestern Cape of South Africa. In fact, I keep them with my other South African Cape bulbs and grow them and store them during summer dormancy along with them, such as Lachenalia. They come out of dormancy all on their own once it gets cool and the winter rains start to fall. And they multiply easily without any special care. Each of my pots in the photos I hopefully successfully attached all started from one bulb from different sources. If I didn’t know their natural habitat, I wouldn’t have guessed it from their behavior here.

The other question I have has to do with the different subspecies or varieties of T. cyanocrocus. The “typical” intense blue one, sometime called T. c. var. cyanocrocus, is considered the type variety, and the two other color forms, var. leichtlinii and var. violacea, are considered to be mere color variations. However, my experience is that the leichtlinii variety is far more vigorous in every way to the pure blue variety. It grows more strongly, reproduces more quickly, and blooms far more frequently and vigorously than the pure blue one (or the violet one). You can see that in the photos as well which were taken at the same time where the pots are at opposite ends of the bench they’re on. (The violet ones hadn’t started blooming yet.) They are treated identically all year round. It kind of makes me think the leichtlinii variety is the typical species and the other two varieties were color mutations. The photos in the two articles I’ve seen showing two different populations in their natural habitat are hard to discern, but they don’t seem to be mostly the intense blue form. But maybe the leichtlinii variety also happens to be the most adapted to low elevation southern California conditions and that’s why they do so much better for me?

--Lee Poulsen
Pasadena, California, USA - USDA Zone 10a
Latitude 34°N, Altitude 1150 ft/350 m