Cyrtanthus offsetting question

[Paul T]

Howdy All,

I knocked a couple of Cyrtanthus out of their pots today to send some offsets to a friend.  The first one had a scape on it so I carefully unearthed down the side of the bulb to the largest offset and found that it was still completely fused to the main bulb with no roots of it's own.  The other offsets were obviously much smaller judging by their leaves so I left them all alone and went onto the second pot.  This was a different variety and it has lots of leaves above ground but only 2 main bulbs below ground, and a tiny (perhaps 6 or 7mm wide) offset that was easily removed and had a complete set of it's own roots.  This tiny offset was less than half the size of the large offset I was hoping to remove from the previous pot, so I went back to the original pot and unearthed it again (I do hope the scape is going to survive the repeated root disturbance) and went to check the other smaller offsets on the original bulb.  Despite them being well less than half the size of the offset I first looked at, these all had complete bulbs and their own roots, easily removed from the main bulb.  If I hadn't seen the tiny one on the other pot I never would have even looked at these as I would never have thought that they'd be more advanced bulb and root-wise than the other much larger offset.

Has anyone else noticed this phenomenon?  Each of these tiny bulbs almost looked like tiny stolons (they had a little connector a couple of mm long between them and the parent), while the main offset was more of a traditional offset, slowly emerging from the side of the main bulb, if you know what I mean.  I thought it rather strange myself, as I didn't expect these two markedly different appearing offset forms.  Has anyone else observed this?

Thanks all.

[Heinie]

Paul,

You do not mention the name of the Cyrtanthus in your post. I have over 20 different species and have never seen what you are experiencing with your rootless offset. If taken off it should root very easy. Although some species like the C mackenii and C brevifloris makes lots of small bulb offsets mostly directly attached to a bigger bulb or sometimes a length of rhizome attached to the main bulb every season. Some of the bulbs only produce one or two baby bulbs every season.

[Paul T]

Heinie,

The 2 bulbs are a mackenii and what I think is a mackenii hybrid.  The one that has produced the large offset that is still melded into the main bulb (it could not be removed at this stage, it is still firmly part of the main bulb despite it's size) is Cyrtanthus mackenii 'Red Prince', which judging by the size and shape of the flower is actually a hybrid not a straight mackenii.  I haven't been able to find out any more on it, despite trying to contact a few people about it.  I only received it a year ago maybe and it has already produced the large offset and around a half dozen of the small offsets, that as you mention have a small piece of rhizome attaching them to the parent bulb.  The other thing about the 'Red Prince' is that the main bulb is at least twice the size of any of my mackenii bulbs, also leading me to believe it is a hybrid.  That is why I didn't mention the species names on the original post.

[Heinie]

Paul,

Has this hybrid flowered yet. I would love to see the flower. The mackenii bulbs grow to about the size of a golf ball. I have not seen much bigger than that.

[Paul T]

Heinie,

None of my mackenii have ever got near to the size of a golfball bulb-wise here, but that is about the size of this 'Red Prince'.

Here's a pic I posted previously of it ===> http://www.srgc.org.uk/smf/index.php?topic=2856.msg67050#msg67050
It is also not far off opening flowers at the moment, which is why I was trying to be careful with the roots etc when checking for offsets.