Jane, you’re not confusing Tecophilaea violiflora, which I also grow, with T. cyancocrocus var. violacea, are you? They are two very different plants. The T. c. var. violacea looks and grows exactly like the other two color forms and you can’t tell the difference until they flower. There is a cultivar called ’Storm Cloud’ that is a cross between var. leichtlinii and var. violacea that looks just like var. leichtlinii except that instead of a pale blue edge has a lavender edge. The var. violacea has a purple color every bit as intense as the blue variety. T. violiflora is a much smaller plant with a smaller flower that isn’t as intensely colored as the T. cyanocrocus flowers are and mine are more of a blue-violet color too. My pot of var. violacea hadn’t started blooming yet when I took the two photos. Also, I only have one pot of it. I used to have just as many as the other two varieties but a couple of summers ago, mice found most of the violacea pots and ate every single corm in them except for one pot that they missed. They also ate all the corms of my pot of ’Storm Cloud’. Now I keep mousetraps in with my pots in my summer dormancy storage area. That seems to have worked. I wonder if the solid blue without white coloring is due more to the growing conditions and weather and/or climate that they grow in while in active growth before they flower. The white in my all-blue forms seems variable from winter to winter, sometimes having quite a bit, while other winters having very little. One really cold winter, they were essentially all blue with no white. I sourced my bulbs from all over, from here in the US, from England, and from New Zealand. After a couple of years, they all seem to have the same amount of white in them in any given winter. The last president of IBS contacted me when he had someone write an article on Tecophilaea for Herbertia and he was looking all over for photos of the solid blue form. He didn’t like any of mine, and kept insisting that the true form was a solid blue with no white especially the white lines. He finally found someone who had a photo of what he was looking for. The thing to keep in mind is that the blue form with white is still the intense blue, but with some white in the center and sometimes some white rays extending out towards the outer part of the petals. But it’s not nearly as much white as in the leichtlinii form in which only the outer third of each petal is blue, and the leichtlinii blue is not the intense blue of the blue form. It’s what I would call a “sky blue” or a “baby blue”. It’s much paler, whereas the blue form is what I would call a “pure blue” or “solid blue” or the blue of an RGB display that is only showing the blue pixels lit up (at full intensity). The ones in the pots shown all grew vegetatively from one bulb each. (Some I’ve had long enough that they now fill two pots as well as some I’ve traded away.) I’ve recently grown some from seeds but they aren’t blooming yet. I can’t always seem to get seeds to germinate some years. And I think the baby bulbs don’t like to be kept as dry during summer as I keep the full-sized bulbs, which I’ve never had any problems with, whereas some of my seedling bulblets haven’t made it alive until fall. I also have to hand pollinate if I want seed set. I pretty much never get seeds unless I hand pollinate, which in my case is I have a very small horsehair paintbrush and I just twirl it into the center of one flower then twirl it into the center of the next flower of a different pot, and I keep doing that until I’ve “twirled” all the flowers of that variety. --Lee Poulsen Pasadena, California, USA - USDA Zone 10a Latitude 34°N, Altitude 1150 ft/350 m > On Feb 16, 2022, at 3:03 PM, Jane McGary via pbs <pbs@lists.pacificbulbsociety.net> wrote: > > Tecophilaea violacea is listed in Chilean field guides as a separate species, not a color form, and it is said to have a different distribution. > Very likely the intense blue form was selected by European/British growers when wild-collected material was being imported. During our recent PBS board meeting, Jan Jeddeloh showed a nice pot grown from seed, and they had a lot of white in them. I've kept the all-blue forms going, but I started with imported bulbs from a Dutch supplier some years ago. _______________________________________________ pbs mailing list pbs@lists.pacificbulbsociety.net http://lists.pacificbulbsociety.net/cgi-bin/… Unsubscribe: <mailto:pbs-unsubscribe@lists.pacificbulbsociety.net>