What’s in Bloom

Our Floriculture team embraced the challenge of growing Jasminum polyanthum, a fragrant vine native to southwestern China, in a new way, training plants generally cultivated as hanging baskets into striking, oversized twelve-foot towers. These specimens required more than ten months of careful cultivation, beginning with vegetative cuttings that grew outdoors in the container field through spring and summer before being moved to a cold greenhouse for fall and winter vernalization, a necessary period of cold that initiates flowering. Three weeks ago, the plants were transferred to a warm greenhouse to encourage them into bloom. As you walk through the Main Conservatory, enjoy the sweet fragrance of the jasmine flowers. 

One of the first blooms to appear in the new year, Eranthis hyemalis has sunny yellow flowers with a sweet honey-like fragrance. Its flowers look like solitary buttercups sitting on a circle of lacey green leaves. They open wide on sunny days from late winter to early spring and thrive in the shade of deciduous trees.  They will naturalize in well-drained, fertile soil under deciduous trees.


 

'Jelena' is an early-flowering selection of Hamamelis × intermedia, a hybrid between Japanese witch-hazel (Hamamelis japonica) and Chinese witch-hazel (Hamamelis mollis). These large, deciduous shrubs provide excellent winter interest with their slightly fragrant, coppery orange, spider-like flowers that start to appear in mid- to late January.  'Jelena' is easy to grow in full sun or part shade in well-drained soil.  The winter flowers are best illuminated by full sun and are best shown against a dark green background of conifers or broadleaf evergreens.

Clivia miniata ‘Longwood Winter Green’ is a distinctive cultivar developed through the long-running clivia breeding program at Longwood. Derived from the South African species Clivia miniata, this selection is notable for its soft green, almost chartreuse flowers. The cultivar was officially released and named in 2019, becoming the sixth introduction from Longwood’s breeding program, which began in 1976 with the goal of developing improved ornamental clivias with novel colors and forms. ‘Longwood Winter Green’ represents the program’s first green-flowered selection, with creamy green petals surrounding a deeper green throat, held above glossy, strap-like evergreen foliage. The development of this cultivar reflects decades of careful hand pollination, seed evaluation, and selection, an inherently slow process, as clivia seedlings may take seven to ten years from pollination to full evaluation before a new cultivar is introduced.

Foliage: 3-4 linear leaves, green with a white stripe down the center; emerge with the flowers and die back in May. Flower: 1-2 flowers; mauve to purple, pinkish or white, with a white throat, yellow stamens and orange style. Petals silvery on the outside. Open in sun, close at night or in inclement weather. February or March, depending on the weather. Bulb: Corm, 1" or less in diameter; tunic with fine parallel fibers. Commercial grade is 4+ cm.

This evergreen succulent from east tropical Africa is known for its towering height potential (it can grow up to nearly 10 feet tall—ours are about 2.5 feet tall now), as well as its vibrant red blooms that appear like sparks. We received an Aloe nyeriensis in 1969 and have been growing and propagating it ever since. Growing Aloe nyeriensis completely in-house is a process that takes more than 16 months of two warm cycles and a cold cycle, with manipulated daylength along the way.

The small, fragrant, nodding white flowers of snowdrops are a welcome sight in early spring!.  These small bulbs naturalize in woodland gardens with rich, moist soil.  Native to the eastern Mediterranean region and southern Ukraine, these geophytes combine well with winter-aconite and witch-hazels.  Chimes Tower showcases a growing collection of snowdrop species and cultivars, their graceful white blooms emerging as one of the garden’s first and most welcome signals of spring!

Safari Orange aloe, Aloe ‘ANDora’, provides winter color thanks to showy spikes of brilliant orange flower clusters, which attract hummingbirds when grown outside. This hybrid Safari Orange is a result of a breeding program that started in South Africa in 1973 that was looking for hybrid aloe selections that had ideal horticultural characteristics such as vigor, flowering consistency, and disease resistance. This perennial succulent needs excellent drainage when grown in pots.

Leucospermum ‘Brandi Dela Cruz’ is a South African shrub known around the world as a popular cut flower. In South Africa, it is a popular garden plant producing bright orange pincushion flowers that are 5 inches wide and held on 30-inch stems. The genus name Leucospermum comes from the Greek word 'leukos' meaning "white", and 'sperma' meaning "seed". This is in reference to the white fleshy skin that covers the seeds. This evergreen shrub that will grow upwards of 7 feet tall if the flowers are not cut annually. 

Trifidacanthus unifoliolatus is a unique leguminous shrub, in fact the only species in its genus Trifidacanthus. Native to Southeast Asia, including Hainan (China), Vietnam, the Philippines, it grows in wet tropical and semi‐open habitats. One distinctive feature is its trifid (three‐pointed) spines, which develop from old flowering stems and stalks as these structures harden. The leaves are relatively small leathery, and often have a single leaflet (hence its specific epithet unifoliolatus), despite being in a genus of legumes. The plant blooms from spring through summer with small purple, flowers that smell similar to grapes,. In horticulture it is sometimes called the “Vietnamese Blue Bell Tree,” and is cultivated ornamentally (including as bonsai), for its attractive flowers and unusual, twisty and spiny growth habit.

Longwood Gardens forces blue-poppies to flower every year in March. This cultivar, 'Lingholm', produces large flowers that are four inches in diameter on average. Blue-poppies, native to the high elevations of the Himalayan Mountains, are infrequently cultivated outside their native habitat. Given the right conditions, however, they can thrive in gardens located in the northern regions of North America and Europe.