Orange lip variegated flowers of Five Coloured Orchid Variegated Chinese Clivia

Below are photos of one of my most valuable breeding plants. The leaves have five colours - white, light grey, dark grey and two shades of green. Grey and white are very sought after colours on variegated clivia leaves and a combination of these colours are quite rare to find.  Grey are usually found on fukurin variegation. The colours of the flowers are white, light green, medium green, yellow and orange. The flowers develop as white, green or green variegated flowers. The inner center of the flowers is a combination of two colours, yellow and orange in this case. This is also a rare phenomenon and something I have seen only on some ghost flowers. As the flowers open, orange start to develop around the edge of the petals. As for the leaves of this highly sought after variegated clivia, each flower looks differently with different patterns developing on the petals. When the flowers open the green variegation is quite pronounced, but it fades into either white or green or vague variegation when the flower is ready to drop. The pollen grains are much larger than any type of clivia and it is extremely difficult to get seed from this clivia, although it is luckily not sterile. It is approximately 7 years old and has made no offsets. Some of its seedlings should flower within a year or two and it will be interesting to see whether they also have variegated picotee flowers. Unlike other clivia plants with variegated flowers, the flowers of this plant is large and fully developed. The picotee and variegation patterns are visible on both side of the petals as you can see from the last photos. It is said that plants with variegated flowers and break up of flower colours as the case with this plant is used to create new flower colours.

Fukurin and Mandarin Duck LOB

Below are a couple of my favourite clivia - Fukurin and Mandarin Duck LOB Darumas with an ordinary Fukurin. Most of the plants in the pictures originate from Anshan and I imported them many years ago as 2 to 3 year old seedlings.

Variegated Flowers of my variegated Chinese Clivia

Below are photos of my variegated plant with variegated flowers. In 2008 I have seen photos of such a plant in a Clivia book in China. Since some photos in books are faked, I started to ask around if someone has seen similar flowers on a plant. A collector in Beijing responded positively and told me that he had a couple, but sold them as the flowers are not stable. He could not show me any photos of his plants or where I could look for similar plants. I forgot about them and when I returned to South Africa in November 2009 one of the plants I imported as a seedling a few years earlier had a variegated flower on it. Unfortunately the flower was damaged. The plant come from one of the top 5 growers in China in 2006 who lives in Changchun. It is a relatively small plant with thick narrowish leaves with good variegation on the leaves. When I returned in 2010 from China, it flowered a month after my arrival, again in November. This time with more flowers and one flower with three orange petals - one of them variegated. I took the plant outside the shadehouse to photograph it in natural light.

Note the white flowers on the white section of the flower stem and the variegated flowers on the variegated side. I decided to place the plant in a suuny spot inside my house where it will be exposed to full sunlight for at least 4 hours per day to see the real colours of the flowers as shady conditions usually lead to lighter coloured flowers. Unfortunately I forgot about the plant and remember about it only on the 3rd day - after the sun damaged the flowers a little bit. But at least the true flower colours has become visible. Note the orange rims on some of the flower petals and the darker green variegation that makes the variegation almost invisible.

At the same time another interesting Chinese plant was in flower that produce green tulip flowers every year.

The colour of the flowers changed somehow after a few days in the sun as I placed it with the plant with the variegated flowers in the house. The green of the flowers is still visible to a degree.

The green leaf plant with the green tulip flowers easily produce seed, but the variegated plant produced only one seed a year ago.This year I am hoping to harvest at least four seeds from it. I suspect that the variegated plant will produce a % of offspring with variegated flowers, but will have to wait a couple of years to see the results.