Crocus March 2012

[Janis Ruksans]

Regardless of protection, losses are quite important here. Today took out of regular beds 39 pots to keep them dry (not watering) hoping that may be some small offsets will be formed on top of old corm. Some minimus stocks are between them, Seriously suffered laevigatus (two stocks completely lost), caspius, boryi, aleppicus and several others. Mostly autumn blooming species but several spring ones, too.
Now started blooming cvijicii and first flower of pelitericus came out.
Janis

[Janis Ruksans]

Crocus albiflorus variability from Jura mnt in Chelvetia and from Croatia
And few pictures of Crocus atticus raised by me and named 'Michael Hoog's Memory'.
And as last in this entry Crocus malyi (pictured in garden)
Janis

[Janis Ruksans]

Crocus olivieri balansae from Spilos (grown in greenhouse) and variability of Crocus versicolor (all pictures from garden).
Janis

[tonyg]

Always beautiful crocus Janis.  The Crocus versicolor, grown outside are most beautiful especially 17 & 27.

[Otto Fauser]

a few easy autumn Crocus flowering and thriving in my garden at the moment .
The C. speciosus 'Crimean Giant ' is the largest flower of all the species I grow , raised from seed collected in the Crimea in the 1970,s

[Otto Fauser]

and 3 photos of C. caspius -all derived from C.caspius P.F. 5035 ,  seed that Paul Furse sent me in the 1960,s . It varies from white to lilac-pink . noticed a fasciated stem yesterday with 2 flowers on it . I wished some of the rarer species would be as easy to cultivate as caspius .

[Gerry Webster]

Wonderful to see such a nice clump of C. caspius. It may be easy to grow but is extremely difficult - actually, impossible - to obtain from commercial sources. I lost my own plants (the pink form) some years ago but was lucky enough to be given some replacements recently.

[Janis Ruksans]

I wish that caspius would be more hardy. Pity, but most of my caspius are gone after this winter...  Otto, may be you will have some spare seeds after winter? Even several speciosus, especially xantholaimos. archibaldii and some othre Turkish seriously suffered or even died this winter with me.
Janis

[Janis Ruksans]

Still some crocuses bloome in greenhose
Crocus carpetanus blue form
Crocus cvijicii - white seedling
Vrocus minimus Bavella from Archibald, not very typical due orange style, traditionally Bavella has white style
Crocus pelistericus - 2 pictures
Light C. reticulatus from Russia (Pjatigorsk) pictured few days ago
and Crocfus suaveolens from Thomas

[Martin Baxendale]

Have (already!) started harvesting seed from my cross of sieberi 'Stunner' X cvijicii. Don't think I've ever had seed ripen so early on a spring-flowering crocus before. Seed pods started to appear within about a month of doing the cross and were already fully up a good cm above the compost level in late March. I expected them to take a while to ripen but today the first two pods started to split open to reveal ripe pink seeds ready for sowing.