Some early Bomarea

[charlie]

Big fan of Bomarea in general but these winter/spring flowering sorts seem to do better with a bit of protection.

This is Fiesta, Chad gave me a huge pot full but it hated being split and has only just started flowering after a couple of years of sulking. I grew this from seed I bought back from California and have it in the garden where it is sadly a late autumn flowerer so never sets seed.

Bomarea fiesta 001 by charliepridham, on Flickr

Looking even more orange is this stunner from Tom Hudson, you will find it in his conservatory. No idea what species but it didn't like life completely outdoors

Bomarea 009 by charliepridham, on Flickr

Bomarea sp 010 by charliepridham, on Flickr

[Peyton]

Well they will use rangefinder binoculars for sure and hybridise given half a chance!

That Fiesta looks beautiful. Much fuller and color-intensive than mine.

[charlie]

Well they will hybridise given half a chance!

[Tony King]

Really lovely plants Charlie.

The orange variety especially so, I like how the flower clusters really stand out but you also have the more intricate beauty of the individual flowers close up.

I have not been that successful with the couple I have tried but do really enjoy seeing them.

How do you control slugs/snails that I found an annoying pest. In hindsight, I really should have anticipated them and took preventative measures.

Thanks for sharing those pictures.

[MartinNicklin]

I was about to send for a Fiesta from a Cornish grower of climbers, fom whom I've had a number of plants. BUT! I've just seen this old post. My questions are:
1. I already have one from this seller called Orange Sunset. It has grown with vigour reaching the top of my 8ft high greenhouse but the flowers were disappointing: sparse and tiny. Would Fiesta be an improvement on this? It's quite expensive for a very small potted baby plant so I don't want to waste the money.
2. Could the plant Charlie has from Tom Hudson be Orange Sunset and therefore I have something better to look forward to given time? (Especially given that my plant also came from Cornwall)
I'm not familiar enough with this genus to answer these questions.
I see Crug offer some tempting species but postage from there is not good value.

[charlie]

I found fiesta to be shy to flower outside, Chad did give a huge pot full but that also failed to do much and although my original plants came from the seed off the front of Carlos Rendon s house in San Francisco mine never produced any seed and they are tricky to do by division!

This is mine the one and only time it flowered in November it didn't set seed

Bomarea Fiesta 084 by charliepridham, on Flickr

It still throws up a couple of shoots each year!

[upperbaygardener]

In one of the the Phillips & Rix books - presumably bulbs though I don't have it to check (one of the few I don't own) - there's a pic of a wonderful looking Bomarea hybrid called Bomarea × cantabrigiensis. Other than, reassuringly, a link at Cambridge with some basic information about it, one sees very little on the web. Is it still in commerce? Has anyone here grown it? It's a cross w/B. hirtella that is a little showier. Certainly, if there were commercial demand, these could be micro-propagated in the same way as the related Alstroemerias are?

I don't have the ability to access the Curtis Botanical article about it...https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/curt.12183
I suppose if I were very curious I could get my university professor brother to download it for me.

As for B. hirtella, it grows surprisingly well here in a mid zone 7 on the US east coast. No issues about summer heat, although the fact it and other Bomareas never took off as ornamentals down south makes me wonder if it eventually would have a problem with heat and humidity. (Phormium can just barely tolerate my summers, and my winters...but you certainly don't see them in places like Charleston or New Orleans, where they would be fully winter hardy!) The genus is certainly fairly well known to US horticulture as a whole...there are huge, spectacular vines at public gardens in the Bay Area, and probably elsewhere in California, that have presumably been there for decades. B. hirtella is almost fully hardy here...I lost a plant to the polar vortex winters around 2013-2015 though. I then had 2 seedlings grown from European seed that had performed well, but one seemed to die in this last winter, which also went to -17C/1F. However, I just noticed the "dead" one finally sprouted in September! Given its weakened state, I should probably dig it up for winter.

[MartinNicklin]

Interesting to read your comments from Maryland David. What kinds of stuff do you grow over there?

I’ll give the Fiesta a miss based on comments made by Charlie. I’ll live in hope that the Orange Sunset gets better with age plus I have this year my replacement edulis.

After all this time, has anyone managed to get pardina? Now that’s the one I think most people would like to have a bash at.

[upperbaygardener]

What kinds of stuff do you grow over there?

Whatever I can! Seriously though, my approach to gardens is inspired by growing up in a sheltered suburban (borderline exurban back then) enclave of DC that happened to have a lot of people who aspired to 'designs on the land' more seriously than bog standard Americans, including 3 first generation European families. (The next generations of one of them having returned there...telling statistics about our 'land of opportunity'. I doubt that ratio, 33%, was the norm 50 or 100 years ago) So I was regaled with tales of the beautiful jacaranda trees of Johannesburg, or, for example, a woman's father bringing seeds from Kenya back to Dublin and trying to grow them in their garden. (He was a doctor attached to Catholic missions in Africa, something like an early Médecins Sans Frontières I guess) I was also HUGELY influenced by watching the inimitable Peter Seabrook, who had travel segments on the US show Victory Garden. And then my own trips to Europe/UK in 1993, 1996, and 1999...I'd still call those 'formative years'! I went once more in 2010. I might - it's a big might - do a trip to Cornwall next spring. So will seek advice as required.
Obviously I attempt to have a gardenesque idiom inspired by maritime or subtropical highland gardens, in so far as that is possible in the hellish (though not nearly as hellish as much of the CONUS!) climate of Northeastern Maryland.
I don't want to became a pesky American interloper, but with the declining amount and quality of discourse and expertise on, eh, various other forums, it's useful to have an account here. You guys will always be the lords and ladies of serious horticulture!

[MICHAEL]

The yellow and orange one is very pretty.