Geissorhiza. Il est fini!

New work – part one. As I’ve got two new pieces to share with you I will spread them out over two posts.

This is the Geissorhiza picture you have seen me working on over the last few weeks. I am the biggest critic of my own work but I admit I am pleased with this piece. I can already see a tweak I need to make but it is minor.

As I did in the last two updates on this piece I am going to give some info on some of the plants portrayed.

The tall pale blue species at the back is Geissorhiza aspera. This species can occur in vast swathes in its native South Africa – tinting large areas blue. It does vary in colour and shade and I have a few specimens that look more violet, and some almost white, as well as various shades of blue. It is an easy plant to cultivate but increases rapidly by producing lots of tiny offsets from its corms – this can lead to overcrowding in a pot and then the plants get starved and fail to flower well.

The pale yellow species with a purple centre at the right hand side is G. darlingensis, which is now restricted to a tiny nature reserve near Darling in South Africa. I do not have a good reference photo of this as my only plant does very poorly and I find it rather hard to grow! The picture was cobbled together from an old slide. I direct you to the Pacific bulb society page for photographs instead: http://pacificbulbsociety.org/pbswiki/index.php/GeissorhizaSpeciesOne

The purple species in the centre and top right is G. monanthos. This actually shares its habitat with G. radians (the blue and red species to the left of it and discussed in an earlier post) and has a fairly limited distribution. I find it easy to grow but it often has fallow years where it does not flower.