Pseudogaltonia clavata (and blooming from seed)

Mary Sue Ittner msittner@mcn.org
Thu, 15 Jul 2010 17:53:42 PDT
My husband and I were lucky enough to be taken by David Victor to see 
Harry Hay and his extensive garden in 2004. In bloom for the first 
time from seed sown 21 years earlier was this species. It was very 
striking, but that's a very long time to wait.

You have to be impressed however with the optimism of the people who 
grow things like this from seed. There are pictures of Harry's plants 
on the wiki page and a photo of the bulb from Jacob.
<http://pacificbulbsociety.org/pbswiki/index.php/…>
Harry lives in the UK which I would think would be very different 
from Namibia so perhaps if you lived in the right place the time from 
seed to bloom would be shorter. I've often wondered if it bloomed 
again for Harry. I've found with some of the plants I have grown from 
seed from South Africa that their best flowering ever is the first 
time they bloom from seed. Some things once they start blooming 
continue to bloom each year and others bloom erratically after that 
or dwindle away. It could just be my lack of skill or  perhaps once 
they bloom they feel they have done what they needed to do. I believe 
Will Ashburner from Australia who some of you may remember from long 
ago IBS days made the same observation when he was keeping good 
records of what he grew.

I remember also Tony Palmer from New Zealand complaining that 
Lapeirousia corymbosa often did not come up. Seed I got from 
Silverhill germinated so well  that I gave a lot of the little ones 
away. It came up reliably until the year it bloomed (and bloomed 
really well) and since then it often stays below ground. This past 
year I had one flower from a corm that found its way into another 
pot, but none from several other pots of this species. I finally got 
Lapeirousia oreogena to bloom from Bill Dijk's seed (from his US 
trip) last year after wanting it for so long and I'm hoping it won't 
be a one time event.

Mary Sue

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


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