Central asian anemones?

[pontus]

Hello Everyone,

does anyone have any experience growing the fabulous central asian anemone species, such as for example gortschakowii and neopavoinia..etc? are they easy to grow? are they hardy? i tried gortschakowii a few times but failed miserably at growing it...but perhaps the corm i recieved was of poor quality?

i would love to grow these together with my central asian allium species and also my tulipa atchinsonii clusianoides...they would look really nice together..

the problem then will be finding them..i have alsmost never seen them for sale or swap anywhere...any ideas?

Pontus

[Darren]

I grow a number of these, though not the two species you mention. 

rareplants.co.uk offer a few most years (they currently offer baissunensis) and forumist Jan Jilek offers a lot of them though I've never bought from this source.

The ones I grow are perfectly cold hardy (biflora, tschernjaewi, petiolulosa,  plus several similar yellow 'species') but do need a dry summer rest so I keep them under glass here - this may not be necessary if you have a dry summer climate. I find them reasonably easy, though biflora is trickier than the others.  They are watered on a typical 'bulb' schedule - a good watering in autumn and then kept just moist until growth appears - this is as early as January for some. They are then watered freely until May and then dried off for the summer.

I'm certainly no expert on them but I can keep them going, so a couple of years back I was persuaded to write about growing them for the Edinburgh SRGC group newsletter. As a result of this an expanded version of the article has just been submitted to the SRGC journal.

[pontus]

ok

it would be interesting to reade your article if you have a copy.

i would say that it gets quite warm and dry in summer here. the problem is if some start growing in january when its very cold here..but perhaps most sp stay dormant untill spring arrives?

it might be good to put them in pots which are then plunged into the border, as they are quite rare and i imagine make quite small tubers, once dormant it could be easy to not find them again in case i ever found i wanted to moove them to a different spot...

i just got 2 bassuiriensis from Paul Christian, so now i need to try and find 1 more good yellow sp and 1 or 2 good red and also pink sp to complete my small "trial" collection

Pontus

[Darren]

I suspect that tschernjaewi starts into growth early here because we have mild winters. If yours are colder I suspect they would wait for spring.

A flowering size tuber is around 1cm in diameter. They do get bigger with more growing points as they age. I have one plant labelled 'Anemone verae' which propagates vegetatively as the tubers fall into pieces, each with a growing point. Otherwise they have to be propagated from seed - so it is good you bought two of the baissunensis! One-year old seedling tubers are only 1-2mm across and dark in colour so can be hard to find in the pot!

Here they do not flower at the same time as most alliums and tulips as they start so early. In a colder winter area they may coincide.