Cyclamen 2009

[Roma]

Second lot of pictures. Some of the smaller hybrids have attractive bicolour flowers.

[Maggi Young]

You can't fault these cyclamen for flower power, can you? Super photos, too, Roma 
These mega bedding displays are bit of a change for a woman who grows  Medal winning champion Cyclamen rohlfsianum, aren't they?  Slightly surprised you could keep a straight face..... you must have been busy concentrating on getting great pictures!! 

[Roma]

It was great fun dashing round the greenhouses snapping away. I took 97 pictures in just over an hour.  I may show some of the others in another thread once I've got them sorted and resized.  I'm still very much a novice at it but I am making fewer mistakes.  Trouble is if I don't keep doing things on the computer I forget and have to work it out again or I get something right and forget how I got there.  I've only been using a computer for about 4 years and at my age information does not seem to stick the same. 

[David Shaw]

Maybe that is what I should do, Roma.
The subjects may not be our first choice for filling our greenhouses but your pictures have done them justice.

[Jo]

I wonder if anyone else's Cyclamen coum BSBE form 1 looks like this. It has pure silver/pewter leaves, and flat flowers.  Two plants are flowering like this at the mo and were the same last year. They were from cyc soc seed exchange in 05

[shelagh]

Well Jo those are certainly different although I seem to recall (and I think it was on the forum) some time last year that someone put up a picture of a cyclamen with 'droopy' flowers, but I'm not sure if if was the same flavour as yours.

[ashley]

I wonder if anyone else's Cyclamen coum BSBE form 1 looks like this.

Hi Jo,

What I got as BSBE form 1 from Tilebarn several years ago looks like yours.  However seedlings from it are very varied, with few (maybe 10-15%) retaining the pure silver leaf.

[Jo]

There must be a whole mix out there going under that name. The Cyclamen book, C G-W, suggests that form 1 should have leaves banded with silver. Mine have entirely silver.  The book also suggests that form 2 should have pink flowers whereas mine have the christmas tree pattern leaf and white flowers with virtually no blotch.

[ashley]

What's meant by 'banded with silver' (C G-W p. 158*) is unclear to me - just as I'm uncertain how pewter differs from silver (although of course I accept that these terms probably have clear meanings to some people).  But things get more confusing if you look at the caption to figure 57 on page 77: 'Cyclamen elegans: plant with pewtered leaves derived from BSBE 518'.   

  A seedling then?  But this comes soon after the statement that elegans is 'quite distinct' from coum in leaf, flower morphology & flowering time (in cultivation, not in the wild).  Obviously the two taxa hybridize readily but how could a seedling of coum be elegans? 

Is this utterly contradictory or am I just loosing it?


*2003 Revised edition

[Jo]

Agreed Ashley,   

there's some food for thought. I wonder if he means the same expedition rather than the same collection number.  They are, after all different species....now.

[Tony Willis]

In 'Cyclamen' published in 1997, I have not moved on in books since then, elegans is named as a new sub species of Cyclamen coum. I can see no difference but I am not a botanist.

Unless the seed is fresh from the wild I think there is little hope of it remaining true in seed exchanges.Most seed is open pollinated in the greenhouse or garden and I have observed the early bees moving from plant to plant without reading the labels.

[David Nicholson]

 

[Jo]

thats the trouble with bees, no scruples 

[Gerry Webster]

There is an account of the Bowles Scholarship Memorial Expedition to Iran, 1963 (BSBE) by Brian Mathew in the Journal of the RHS, Jan & Feb 1965. Although no collection numbers are mentioned it is possible to make reasonable guesses as to the identity of some of the plants mentioned.

The expedition drove to Iran via northern Turkey & the Black Sea coast. The first cyclamen mentioned (“C. vernum”) was seen  near Bolu - “with plain or marbled leaves....flowers.....carmine purple.” I would guess this to be BSBE 513. The next was  found near Samsun - “in moss on cliffs in very wet situations....most beautiful silvery leafed forms.” I would guess this to be BSBE 518. C. G-W in his ‘97 book assigns this to C. coum subsp. coum on p121 & to C. coum subsp. elegans on p182 (not the only example of careless editing in this book). BSBE did find what I would guess to be C. coum subsp. elegans on the Caspian coast - “with  leaf & flower shape reminiscent of C. pseudibericum.... in moss & often high up on the branches of trees.”

My plant of BSBE 518 came from Tilebarn years ago & has the ‘Christmas Tree’ leaf & quite dark flowers. I find it does better in an open plunge bed than under glass. During the recent very cold spell it looked really miserable with leaves a bit like wilted spinach, but it perked up with the weather & now looks fine with lots of buds.

[Tony Willis]

Refering back to my previous post about wild seed,I have nine plants from a seed pod collected near Bolu. One is plain,one is dark with a few markings and the other seven have a christmas tree effect. I have compared these with one from Nur Dag in SE Turkey a thousand miles away and they look the same.If they collected a plant(plants) under a number and raised seed from it the variation would be infinite.

I have also seen beautifully marked plants near Samsun but also very plain ones there.

CGW suggests there is a cline from Wto E and I think the Cyclamen society have looked at this but I do not know if they also drew the same conclusion.

I think that after 40 years in cultivation with numerous generations raised to still attribute a plant to a collection is not a good idea.