The only flowers blooming here now are inside. I’m into pelargoniums these days, and got a bunch of new ones from Mike Kintgen back in September. Most of the cuttings are rooted and a few are even starting to bloom.
‘Phyllis’
‘Black Boar’
Pelargonium reniforme has deep purple flowers and scalloped leaves that look like a sea shell.
Cyclamen have been a favorite for a few years now. They’re easy to grow if you have a cool house. They don’t like heat and will quickly go dormant if you keep your home much above 70. They like this old drafty house. Some of them are over three years old, and huge. This plant blooms about eleven months out of the year, but it’s best blooms are in winter.
It’s blooms so much it drops seeds that sprout beneath the leaves.
See the little leaves at the bottom of the plant? Those are cyclamen seedlings.
Another view of the seedlings as I separate them from the parent plant.
Seedling looking forlorn, waiting to be transplanted.
Here are the seedlings after transplanting. They look all gangly and silly now, because they were growing underneath the big leaves of the original plant.
These are seedlings from a year ago. They are getting ready to bloom.
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Cyclamen and Christmas cactus are much better choices for a winter flowering plant. They are both easy to get to rebloom, easy to propagate, and don’t take much heat or any chemicals to keep them happy. They’re the perfect eco-friendly houseplants and holiday flower.
I bought my first cyclamen two years ago and it is still blooming! It has hardly ever been out of bloom. Last winter I bought more. They come in many colors and the leaves are all a bit different too. Some have a little silver pattern, others are edged in silver, and some are almost all silver. The leaves are as pretty as the flowers! If you google cyclamen, you’ll get advice to let them “rest” in the summer, and I suppose you can, but here in Rye they are happy outside anytime the temperature is above freezing. In the summer I put mine under a tree, watered them now and then, and they loved it.
This picture was taken last winter. You can see some of the different colors and leaf forms. They also come in a true red and a snow white, if you like more traditional Christmas colors.
The first one that I owned was getting really big last summer. I had transplanted it into a bigger pot the first summer, and so last summer I decided to divide it. You might not realize how radical an idea that is. Cyclamen grow from a tuber, like a potato, and so they can be divided. You have to make sure you get an “eye” or growing point with each section and then you have to hope that it doesn’t get a disease in the open cut. Most cyclamen are grown from seed, and division isn’t recommended. Maybe it was beginners luck, but mine all survived the operation. I didn’t think about taking a picture until after I had already repotted them. You can sort of see the cut side of the tuber here.
That was done this past summer and a couple of weeks ago I decided to take some pictures of how they look now.
And today, with even more flowers:
Can you see the little pots to the right in the picture above? The big plants are from division, but when I started to divide them last summer, I found that they had seeded into the pots! I put all the seedlings into individual pots, too. I think it takes almost a year for them to bloom from seed, so we won’t see what the flowers look like until next summer.
I should have mentioned at the beginning that these are not hardy outside through the winter. These are all varieties of Cyclamen persicum, and are considered only hardy to zone 7 or 8, although I do know a gardener in Aurora who had one overwinter for her in her rock garden. So, not for outside, but if you want something cheerful and long blooming indoors this winter, I don’t think you could find anything better.
Oh, one more thing. These cyclamen like cool temperatures. They don’t really want to be grown in a room that gets into the 70s. That means they’re perfect for our old drafty house. They need bright light, but they don’t need a lot of sun, either, so if you have a cool room with a west or east window, give one a try.
Oh, one more one more thing….we don’t sell these. You can find them at your favorite florist’s or even King Soopers. If the seedlings I potted up do well this winter, we might have them for sale when we open in the spring. I’m mildly obsessed with them and plan to buy a couple more this winter.
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