Scottish Rock Garden Club Forum
Bulbs => Bulbs General => Topic started by: Hans J on December 03, 2006, 10:27:22 PM
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Hi all ,
Here are some pictures of Cyclamen hederifolium from my trip on Corfu in fall .
This is my best found of Cyc. hederifolium –I call it „Corfu Wine“
With best wishes
Hans
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Hans,
That is definitely an impressive colour for a hederifolium. Unlike anything I ever recall seeing before. Very nice!!
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Fantastic colour form. What a pity cyclamen are very difficult to clone.
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What a nice coulour You found.
Thanks for sharing :)
We want to see more of them.
Kind regards
Joakim Balogh Sweden
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Hans
that is a stunning colour - I enjoy growing cyclamen and have never seen a flower with such a deep red colour in a hardy plant. I wonder if the offspring will be as good? Do please keep us informed in future years about the next generation.
Have you a picture of the leaf - I would be interested to see the patern.
thank you for showing us your find.
John
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Hi all ,
here comes some Cyclamen pictures more :
The first is a Cyclamen purpurascens found in the Alps of Savoyen ( France )
It was the only Cyclamen in this color that I ever have found on all of my visits for Cyc. purpurascens .
This flower reminds me on the plants they are descriptet as Cyc. purpurascens f. carmineolineatum - also found in Savoyen .
The second picture shows also a really rare plant :
Cyc. purpurascens f. album - this is a cultivar bougth from a nursery .
This picture was made in the first year after buying -so it has only few flowers.
In this year the same plant has more than 40 flowers !
I have also a second plant from the same source and I have well pollinatet both plant -now I hope !
With best wishes
Hans
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You seem to be able to find some very nice versions of well known cyclamen Hans. Good luck with your pollination.
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Lovely!! I do so like Cyc. purpurascens. Lovely to see the infamous white form.
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Hans,
As Cyclamen hederifolium is probably the most commonly grown cyclamen in our gardens here, it is not over presumptious of us to imagine we have seen certainly the major part of its colour range because of hybridisation in the garden. However, your C. h. 'Corfu Wine' is an astonishing colour indeed, a great strength and depth of red not normally encountered.
I am also struck by your first photograph. In the garden I find that C.h. quickly self-seed and give a very dense covering, especially where grown as a single specimen in a bed. However, in your photograph it gives just a sparse covering to the ground. Obviously, there are other species occupying the same patch and competition keeps the spread of cyclamen in check. From the photograph it seems like a species of arum might might be sharing the ground.
Looking forward to further photographs.
Paddy
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Hi Paddy ,
It was for me too the first time that I have seen such a color – it was like a lightning .
I have really visit a lot of populations with Cyc. hederifolium ( Italy , Greece ,France ) but never such a color ,sometimes - but rare I have found white flowering plants .
Here one word to hybrids :
I think we have not hybrids of Cyc. hederifolium in our gardens – thats all selections of the same species –hybrids are only known as X hildebrandtii ( africanum x hederifolium ) or X whitei ( graecum x hederifolium ).
In some areas on Corfu the ground was full with flowers of Cyclamen , but where I have made this picture was it more sunny and open ground and there grows a lot of other plants like :
Scilla autumnale , Urginea maritima , Arisarum vulgare ,Crocus boryi –so it was better for me to make pictures .
I hope this help you a little bit .
With best wishes
Hans
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Hans,
As Cyclamen hederifolium is probably the most commonly grown cyclamen in our gardens here, it is not over presumptious of us to imagine we have seen certainly the major part of its colour range because of hybridisation in the garden.
Except Paddy, that most of the hederifolium in our gardens, like all of the other cyclamen species, derive from a relatively small number of ancestral stock. Certainly with such a widespread species such as hederifolium, I don't think we've seen the half of it.
Hans, I don't think that's quite how Paddy meant his hybridising comment. I think (but am happy to be corrected) that he was explaining that plants of C. hederifolium have cross pollinated with each other, which would expand the gene pool, which would in turn expand the range of variation one would see in cultivated plants. I don't think Paddy was implying that cross pollination was occuring with other species.
I have some experience with the so-called hybrid between graecum and hederifolium and have come to the conclusion that it doesn't exist. It seems to me that the plants masquerading under the name C. x whitei are simply abberant forms of hederifolium. I grew plant from seed which came to me directly from the source (Jill White) and these would have been produced by actually doing the cross manually - C G-W says in his monograph that the hybrid appears to be sterile, but my seed grown 'x whitei' went on to produce viable seed, which in turn produced seedlings. I think that this 'hybrid' is no more than an odd form of hederifolium.
That flower is wonderful, Hans. I have seen some lovely examples of C. hederifolium on Corfu around Paleokastritsa on the northwest coast with very attractive leaf patterns, but I have not seen anything like the flower in your photo.
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Hi Hans and Tim,
Many thanks for your comments, both, and they are greatly appreciated.
My apologies for my none-too-precise use of language. As Tim assumed, quite correctly, I really shouldn't have used the word 'hybrid' as it was not what I had in mind at all. Rather, I should have said 'variations' or 'selections' to more accurately describe the range of colours which occur in a garden situation with a planting of Cyclamen hederifolium.
I started off with what I presumed were the common forms of Cyclamen hederifolium, variations of pink and a white-flowering plant also. Over the years - the white plant is at least 30 years old at this stage - several different 'pinks' have grown from self-sown seed, the result of which is a range of colours and a range of flowering times, all of which make this bed interesting over a longer time.
I did have a patch of Cyclamen coum in this same bed for a number of years but have since moved them. One small patch of C. purpurascens is still there. What is left now is almost all variations on the common C. hederifolium with some purchased forms added over the past few years - grey-leaved, sagittate-leaved, ones with particularly good markings etc. These may cross pollinate in time and add to the range of interesting variation which occurs naturally.
While I find Cyclamen hederifolium, C. coum and C. purpurascens grow with ease in the open garden I find I am not so successful with cyclamen species and cultivars grown under glass. They germinate with ease from seed but the number which re-emerge in the second year is always down on the numbers at the end of the first. Any advice proffered would be most welcome.
Paddy
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Hans & Tim,
A quick search of computer did not produce the photographs I had hoped for but here are a few of the cyclamen in the garden.
Paddy
Oops! Don't knowwhat has happened to Paddy's pix, they were not showing as thumbnails and the files were "empty" when clicked upon to open.. have removed them to save folk from trying needlessly to see them. Perhaps Paddy can repost them later. I think the files had not been saved correctly before posting. Maggi
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Paddy, it sounds like you leave the seedlings in the pot that the seed was sown in for at least the first summer. I always prick cyclamen seedlings out into individual pots at the cotyledon stage.
Seed of all species sown in August/September has germinated well and the seedlings will stay in the seed pot until late Jan/early Feb when they will be pricked out into 7x7x8 cm square pots, using a mix consisting of peat, J.I. No.2, perlite and composted bark (equal measures, parts by volume). All of the species respond very well to this treatment and the time elapsed between germination and flowering is reduced considerably if the seedlings are potted individually early on like this.
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Tim,
You are a gentleman! Many thanks.
Your text and sequence of photographs make it all so clear. You correctly assumed that I had been leaving my cyclamen seedlings in their seed pot over winter and the following summer.
Looking at your composts, it seems to me that your seed compost is not as open as your potting-on compost; it looks to me more like a peat-based compost, just as I use, and I imagine that when I leave the seedling plants in this over winter, their second winter, it is too wet for them and they consequently rot off and, of course, fail to appear in the following year. Does this sound like a reasonable assumption to you?
I have a number of cyclamen seedling pots at present and must follow your advice and pot them on into a more open mixture early in the New Year. By coincidence, my most successful bed of cyclamen is topped with shredded bark and I find the self-sown seedling settle themselves naturally just under the bark and on top of the soil, so have perfect drainage and are yet protected from conditions above.
Many thanks.
On a separate issue - the photographs I posted yesterday seem not to have appeared correctly for some unknown reason as I posted them in the same way as previously posted photos.
Paddy
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Beautiful as this Cyclamen is, should we be seen to be encouraging the collection of them in the wild?
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Hi John
I too did worry about the ethics of removing this plant from the wild and would not normally condone wild collection. But as it is a 'monstrosity' and not at all like the normal plant I agree with it being collected. There have been some very interesting articles on similar dilemmas within the fern growing society when genetic abnormalities are found.
It would be unlikely to survive for long or reproduce very successfully in the wild and has a much greater chance when being nurtured by an enthusiastic gardener.
with my best wishes
John
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The legal position is that it is illegal to collect tubers of ANY cyclamen species from ANY country without the expressed permission of the local government authorities, or the relevant CITES/DEFRA certificates needed to bring the plants back into this country. I imagine that these rules apply to Germany too. I know that DEFRA camp out on the Yahoo! Cyclamen-L site, so we all have to be careful about what we admit to regarding the collection of wild plants I think, especially if plants on the DEFRA 'list' are being referred to.
I'm not objecting to the collection of this plant at all, nor am I passing judgement - I would have collected it myself. I collect many hellebores when I'm out in the Balkans, although I don't make a point of collecting just horticulturally attractive specimens. My reasons for collecting hellebores are scientific ones, so I must collect a range of plants, from the mediocre through to attractive specimens, so that any study is worthwhile and meaningful. Hellebores are not on any DEFRA 'list' though, so it's one less thing I have to worry about. I think it would be naive to presume that organisations such as DEFRA don't browse through this site too.
Paddy, yes I think you are absolutely right about your cyclamen seedlings. I do use peat to germinate cyclamen seeds and it does the job - it does hold moisture for a long time and that is just what you want for sown cyclamen seeds - drying out just as the seeds are germinating would be disasterous. I think your problems occur when the seedlings go into their first dormancy. The tubers are tiny at that stage and any moisture that gets into the peat will persist, which in turn probably kills some of the young plants - it's too much moisture for too long a period of time. By potting the seedlings on at the cotyledon stage, they get put into a well draining mix more suited to a plant which needs to be kept on the dry side through the summer. Not too dry for that first year though - it's better to make the mix more free draining than you first intended, because you can at least then get away with watering perhaps a little too often without actually killing anything!
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Quite so, Tim. I will just take this opportunity to restate that opinions expressed here on the Forum are those of the individuals posters and not necessarily of the SRGC. Free speech is a valuable right and we are all at liberty here to express our opinions within reason!
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While I encourage the discussion of the ethics of collecting plants from the wild I would like to point out that at no time has Hans stated that he collected this plant.
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Tim,
Now all I have to do is put this excellent advice into practice. All you say makes perfect sense and I cerainly will be following your method from now on. It certainly seems to me to be one which has a far better chance of success than that I have used to date.
Maggi,
Apologies about the pictures and thanks for your note above and e-mail. It remains a mystery as I had saved them properly and had gone throught the posting routine I had used previously. I won't bother re-posting them. They are not of any particular interest.
Paddy
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Cyclamen elegans (photos 1 & 2) is in full flower here at the moment, providing a bit of colour in the gap between autumn and spring flowering species.
Cyclamen purpurascens is in the middle of a second, smaller flush too.
The first hellebore photo shows H. odorus from Corfu (the north of the island). I collected two of these plants back in 2001 and since then they have been the first species to flower every year. They start to flower in late October/early November. The odorus I have from Croatia, Bosnia and Hungary are much later; they are only just pushing buds through the soil surface.
The second hellebore photo is of true Helleborus orientalis orientalis, grown from seed collected near Tblisi, Georgia.
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Tim
I can see that I can safely take any advice you offer on cyclamen. These are beautiful plants, well grown. Many thanks for the photographs.
I must admit, in my ignorance and lack of experience, that I would have assumed the first two plants to be C.coum pewter group.
Paddy
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I've several times bought seed of or seedlisted the white purpurascens only to have them ALL flower as white (or sometime pink) hederifolium. Maddening.
(What on earth did I mean by that?) ...bought seed of, or seed listed as, the white...