Winter Flowers: Bulbine

Here in the frozen North, winter flowers means indoor flowers!

Bulbine favosa from Penrock Seeds, RSA

An attractive species with a caudex and thin wiry grasslike leaves. The bright yellow flowers are borne on a long spike.

Form B. A dwarf form with short dense tuffs of leaves and numerous flower spikes. Found in short grassland over sheet of exposed rock near the Loskop Dam in Mpumalanga

Funny, I first became interested in this genus of cousins to Aloe and Haworthia via a couple of small succulent species, and this species is small, but nothing succulent about it I had seeds of one of those also, but no germination, alas..maybe I'll try some seed from Mesa....

This one was a pleasant surprise, the seeds of this South African native were only sown last winter, in fact January 14, 2010 (I just looked at the tag yesterday, had thought it was sooner than that!) and one of three plants in the pot is flowering already!

The buds only took a few weeks to develop. Interestingly, the flowers seem to open in the evening-maybe it would be afternoon in natural light, but they are under lights which are on until midnight, and they are open at least a few hours before that.

That means I had to take pictures with no sunlight, explaining the crappy quality of the photos: the flower stalk is higher than the bulbs, so I can't shoot it in situ, since I don't have good lights for photographing, and I'm lousy at flash photos!

For scale, the pot is 4 inches across, and the flowers are about 5mm-1/4inch.

First, a couple of really bad views of the whole plant/flower stalk, then a single flower low on the stalk, then a couple of the later flowers...