PBS Forum

I've grown 'Alberto Castillo' along with a number of other cultivars of Ipheion uniflorum

for years, including a white flowered one I got from England many years ago. And 'Alberto Castillo' is noticeably different than all of the others. It's the most vigorous. It has those distinctly more bluish green leaves. And it almost looks like it's a hybrid with some other species, or at least a different subspecies. I agree that the seeding around produces lots of interesting color variations. But at least in this area (inland southern California), the various cultivars never change that drastically in coloration from year to year.

You can see a hint of blue in the petals. Alberto Castillo is pure white without a hint of blue. Also the leaves of Alberto Castillo are slightly-bluish green. This doesn't look like Alberto Castillo to me.

The Bayer-Monsanto method IMO is capitalism gone off a cliff. I especially abhor the food crops they have genetically altered so that the seeds they produce will not germinate (so you have to buy seeds new from them every year--I think they called the gene the Terminator gene). Then there is another type of genetic manipulation where along with a GMO gene that increases production two-fold or some other benefit, they link another, spliced-in gene that requires a synthetic compound in order to express the two-fold production gene. They then sell fertilizer that has the synthetic compound included in it. So in order to get the doubled production, you also have to, you guessed it, buy your fertilizer from them too. It reminds me of the accusation that some corporations would love to copyright or trademark air if they could, so that everyone would have to pay them for the air that we breathe. (And I'm not anti capitalism. But sometimes some corporations carry things too far IMO.)

Did some googling. I wasn't misremembering it. But apparently Monsanto has temporarily suspended further research into the terminator genetics because of bad world publicity. (You think?)
<https://www.theguardian.com/science/1999/oct/05/gm.food1>
But this article mentioned the other technology I was talking about. That was harder to find but it turns out the concept (and research) is real. It's called genetic use restriction technology or GURT. And the terminator gene is one of two varieties of GURT, V-GURT. T-GURT is the second type I described above. And there is a wikipedia article all about it.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_use_restriction_technology>

Alan Meerow, who is the expert on Andean amaryllids, has said that he thinks it most likely is a new species of Clinanthus.

I may be mixing it up with another Andean amaryllid posted on Facebook, but I thought Viveroscar said a friend was going to publish this as a new species sometime in the future.

(And of course I would love to get seeds of it!)

I'm over in the San Gabriel Valley and I have a couple of 10 year old pots of Lycoris sprengeri

, and they are only just now barely starting to put up leaves even though most of the other Lycoris species I have are in full leaf. So I would plant your bulbs now. They'll have plenty of time to grow and replenish your bulbs. I don't think they go dormant here until June. But the smallest pot you should put them in is a 2 gallon pot. They love lots of room for root growth.

There is another guy here in L.A. County somewhere who has grown Lycoris for many years and wrote an article on Lycoris in one of the last issues of the IBS journal. He has been on PBS before but I don't know if he still is. He can give you much better information about growing them in this area.

A couple of things that have bloomed this month (plus one I won't post a picture of because it's one lone flower and it's really early for me: Tecophilaea cyanocrocus

, which I posted pots full last year).

My first Paramongaia weberbaueri of the season. These flowers are big. The first photo, just the part that is yellow, is about the length of the palm of my hand to the tip of my middle finger.




And a rebloom since I got it last summer, so I've kept it alive! Anigozanthos 'Masquerade' (kangaroo paw). The flowers of my pot of Lachenalia viridiflora

have already faded, so I can't take a side by side comparison photo of both of them. And Ixia viridiflora

isn't anywhere close to blooming yet. (I suppose I could go over to the Huntington to see if either of the teal Puyas are in bloom yet (P. alpestris and P. berteroniana). I don't suppose that their Jade Vine (Strongylodon macrobotrys) in the big greenhouse is in bloom right now. And I've never seen in person Oron Peri's beautiful hybrid creation of Iris palaestina × I. postii <https://seedsofpeace.info/product/iris-palaestina-x-i-postii/>.

Thanks for all the good information and article reference, Carlos. Lima is not hot and it does not rain very much. The landscape looks quite dry. I tried to go to the beach when I was there years ago in February because lots of families were there, but it was too cool for me. Reminded me of trying to go to the beach in the summer in New Zealand. I think I read somewhere that when Ismene amancaes

grow and bloom is the same time that it is very foggy in the coastal hills around Lima. But not much rain, as you saw in the climate chart you linked to. In fact, that same page shows that the smallest number of hours of sun is in June which is when amancaes start to flower. 

As for it possibly being a Paramongaia, other than both having yellow flowers, they are very different from each other. Paramongaia flowers look like giant daffodils/narcissus with a large "cup" or corona and a separate perianth. I. amancaes don't look like daffodils at all. The "cup" is large and almost flat, and the "perianth" is just several very narrow petals. They are very much like a lot of the white Ismene or Hymenocallis, only yellow. The color of amancaes is a very saturated yellow almost like a melted yellow crayon. Paramongaia flowers are just a "normal" amount of yellow. And the leaves of amancaes are soft and tear easily while the leaves of Paramongaia are glaucous (a little bluish in color) and much more stiff. (I'm not a botanist, so I'm just trying to describe what I've seen.) Also, amancaes only grows for about 4 months and is dormant for maybe 8 months while Paramongaia grows for more than 6 months and is dormant for less than 6 months.

I think your climate in Valencia is fairly similar to Uli's climate in Portugal or my climate in southern California. So for you Paramongaia should grow just fine outside all winter. They do like to have plenty of sunshine. But I keep mine at the edge of a tree canopy or the edge of some shade cloth. The explanation is that they get full sunshine there because the elevation of the sun is so low in winter. But the sky directly above them is blocked. Because I have experienced several times when there is very chilly weather and there are zero clouds at night, when the conditions are perfect to have a radiation frost, if the Paramongaia plant is exposed directly above to a cold black sky, the leaves will get burned and some will even die, even if the temperature doesn't go below 0°C. It doesn't kill the plant, but then there are fewer leaves for photosynthesis.

Wikipedia and Kew list the 5 species to be:

• Paramongaia milagroantha (S.Leiva & Meerow) Meerow
• Paramongaia mirabile (Ravenna) Meerow
• Paramongaia multiflora Meerow
• Paramongaia viridiflora (Ruiz & Pav.) Meerow
• Paramongaia weberbaueri Velarde

Some of these are red, including one that is a bright tomato red.

So the new species of Paramongaia that Meerow published is P. multiflora, which is a smaller flower and grows in multiple flowers per scape and is a more greenish-yellow in color. This is the article reference, but I don't have access to this journal: <https://www.biotaxa.org/Phytotaxa/article/view/phytotaxa.416.2.6>. In the article they also move 3 Clinanthus species to Paramongaia based on DNA sequencing. So there are 5 Paramongaia species now. The article where he argues to conserve the Paramongaia genus name is here: <https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/tax.12141>. There is another species from the higher altitude Andes that hasn't been published yet that Dr. Meerow thinks might be yet another species of Paramongaia.

I have seen photos on Facebook from people living in Bolivia of native Paramongaia flowering, presumably P. superba. Alan Meerow has commented to them, pretty much insisting, that they are merely P. weberbaueri. They looked fairly identical to me. Dr. Meerow has been pretty much the expert on the whole genus, publishing one or two new Paramongaia species in the past few years, and publishing a defense to preserve the genus name since it is sister to Clinanthus.

As for the winter vs summer clone, I also have heard stories from various people that the "summer" clone reverts to winter growing after a few seasons. This may have happened to me too. However, I now have an example of a clone, which is sourced to New Zealand, that I was told was winter growing, like my others, that over the space of two additional seasons "reverted" to summer growing. And given that I grow all my Paramongaia in the same soil mixture, pots, and climate, it is surprising to me to see the "summer" clone, which has multiplied and is in two pots, dying down and going dormant at the same time that the winter clones have already started growing this year. I also saw the same in reverse late last spring. The summer clone grew very healthily all summer long, getting watered along with all my other summer growing plants, and sitting out in full sun with moist soil through the hottest days here in inland Southern California. The leaves starting turning yellow on their own when the days got shorter and the nights got cooler. Furthermore, I learned through a sad accident that the winter clones do not like being watered in the summer heat. Some years ago, I had a 1 gal pot with a single bulb in it that accidentally got left out hiding in the middle of a bunch of my summer growing pots that were watered automatically. By the time I discovered it in late summer, the bulb had rotted.

So basically, I can't tell you what the final answer is. But for the moment I have pots of both that most decidedly seem to want to grow during opposite halves of the year.

What is interesting to me is that all of the native growing clumps of Paramongaia I've seen photos of on Facebook are all at higher altitudes in the Andes of Peru and Bolivia. I have yet to see any photos of native Paramongaia growing in the much lower coastal hills of Peru. (Although I've seen many photos of Ismene amancaes, another bright yellow amaryllid, growing all over various protected hillsides of the coastal hills of Peru.)

This is what they said about their subgenus decision:

QuoteA division into subgenera would be informative regarding relationships within each genus, notwithstanding that this subgeneric classification is open to further considerations as their phylogenetic structures are better resolved.

The refinement of the subgeneric taxonomy, however, would not require additional changes in species names (as subgeneric names are not part of the binomial).

Therefore, this scheme is likely to lead to more robust nomenclatural stability in this traditionally contentious group.

And here is a spreadsheet I started to put together of some of the species and how they're related and how their names have been changed based on that paper and subsequent correction paper. 

(BTW, I'm, not a big fan of the amount of "lumping" they did. I thought it was a cop-out compromise they made to specify a bunch of IMO very different subgenera instead of genera. Their excuse was that by only specifying them as subgenera, since the scientific name is only the genus and species names, and not the subgenus names, they won't have to change anything as the DNA sequencing and the tree it produces becomes more refined and subsequent rearrangements of some of the branches or subgroups occur.)

I wouldn't compare Rhodophiala bifida with all the other Rhodophialas. The main reason being that R. bifida is native to Argentina which has summer rainfall/drier winter pattern while all the other Rhodophialas are native to Chile which has a pronounced winter rainfall/very dry summer pattern--even though R. bifida grows during the winter and is dormant during the summer. It doesn't mind summer rains, while the Chilean Rhodophialas, depending on how far north they come from in Chile, may be killed by summer watering/rain.

However, the paper that has turned many of the these genera into merely Hippeastrum or Zephyranthes, also gave a DNA-sequenced tree of many of the species. And it was clear that definite subgenus groupings exist. To the point that the paper actually discusses whether to lump them all together into just two genuses or to give them all different genus names. So they compromised by defining subgenus names and listing all the species they sequenced that belonged in their respective subgenus.

What is interesting are a few species that formerly were placed in some of the other genera now belonging to completely different subgenera along with species that we didn't know they were sister species of.

In any case, in this overall tribe, the thing to pay attention to, in my opinion, are the subgenera. So it turns out that R. bifida is its own Zephyranthes subgenus, Neorhodophiala. Most of what used to be Chilean Rhodophialas are now Zephyranthes subgenus Myostemma (which also used to be a synonym genus name for the Chilean Rhodophialas). And a few of the Rhodophialas are not related to Zephyranthes at all, but instead to the Placeas and Phycellas.

Here is a cladogram from the DNA sequencing of the various groupings among these related species.

Quote from: David Pilling on June 13, 2023, 04:09:59 AMAn interesting thing is that when you see yellow you might be looking at a pure yellow light, a light of a single frequency or two lights combined at the frequencies of red and green.

This is very true. And apparently pure spectral yellow and yellow made from red and green are indistinguishable to humans, but don't look anything alike to flies. I learned that if you want to use the low-tech solution to get rid of flies of using flypaper, you have to be sure that the flypaper color is single frequency yellow rather than a combination of other frequencies. Because flies will not be attracted to non-single frequency yellow flypaper.

There have been many discussions that point out that vinyl stakes (including label stakes made from old mini-blinds) last much longer than the cheaper polystyrene stakes.

That being said, even the vinyl stakes will eventually start to form cracks if out in the sun long enough (years). So in my experience, the two longest lasting methods, using vinyl stakes (unless you want to go a much more expensive route and use metal labels that have the text embossed or engraved on them), are to either use extra fine tip oil-based paint pens (not acrylic or xylene) because no permanent marker of any strength resists eventually fading in sunlight, or make labels with a label maker using black on clear tape and then covering the vinyl stake with the label.

For some reason I don't quite know, the label maker label on vinyl stakes is the superior method. The text never fades, and the adhesive somehow lasts decades such that even when the vinyl finally starts to crack, the clear label still holds the stake together. I have a couple of pots that have some bulbs I received from two different people back in the late '90s that still have the original labelled stakes that came with them. Both are label maker labels stuck on white vinyl stakes that have actually cracked, but are still held together by the label which has not faded in the slightest, still solid black text.

Black oil-based paint marker doesn't fade either, but the vinyl eventually becomes brittle enough to break easily after about 15-20 years. I have a few really old vinyl labels that were probably 4 times as thick as normal that don't bend, and they're still whole.

Maybe using a paint pen on a thin flat rock might outlast anything else, since one of the things some people use paint pens for is to paint rocks.

I've also just started using a medium-point oil-based white paint pen to write on the outside of the pot itself to see if that lasts a long time. I originally got those white wax pencils that some nurseries use to write on the outside of their pots. But discovered that there are creatures out there that eat the white wax. They're very nice to write with, and don't fade. But I started noticing that little pieces of the letters started to randomly disappear over time--until the words became illegible. There was no smearing or fading. So now I'm trying the paint pen method.