Pollination of clivias - A master in Action - Beijing, Peoples Republic of China

Below are photos of a master in action, Quiyi senior, a man who has bred super broad leaf clivia in his days, but nowadays concentrate his efforts to improve the more sought after and higher priced raised vein clivia. The Quiyi family has won numerous awards with their raised vein or crinkle face clivia and their clivia is very sought after. You will always find visitors and buyers at their shade houses on the outskirts of Beijing. The photos below were taken by Quiyi Huang. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do, when I saw it the first time.

Miniature Fukurin Clivia

Below is a photo of my smallest Fukurin. It is grown from seed harvested from a Zhu Jifu plant. Over the past 10 years that I have been growing Zhu Jifu broad leaves I noticed that a small % of the seedlings are dwarfs and/or miniatures. This is due to the dwarf gene found in many of Mr Zhu's plants when he developed miniatures from his short leaf variegated plants.  It is not as small as my mini clivia miniature. The flower next to it is larger than an average size clivia. The other photo is of a super miniata seedling. It's second leaf is almost 5cm wide. From the looks of it, it looks like it will also develop in a type of miniature. Its background is Heng Lan.

  

Clivia mini miniature - smallest of all clivia

Below are photos of my smallest clivia. It is so small that I only discovered it after 3 years in one of my shade houses. As you can see from the photos below, it is less than 4cm from leaf tip to leaf tip. It already has a type of base and is very slow growing. The leaves are thick and deformed. It will probably never flower, but might make offsets one day. That is if a leaf eating insect like a worm or locust does not discover it, because it can make a meal of it and finishes it off within a few hours. I photographed it with a normal size clivia flower so that you can form an idea how small it really is. I also compare it with the width of a clivia chart if you have one.
 

Different types of Chinese Clivia

Below are a few selected slides from a presentation I gave at the Cape Town Clivia Club. The last slide is a photo of the world's largest clivia in Changchun which is the clivia capitol of the world. The aim is to give you a background of Chinese clivia and how they were developed, sometimes under extreme difficult conditions and circumstances. Through careful observation and selection new types were bred and developed which has become very sought after by collectors from all over the world. I was very fortunate to meet most of the breeders who developed the different Chinese clivia varieties. Many of them shared their knowledge how to select quality plants and I hope to tell you more of these visits and the breeders I have met in future posts. My first visit was in 2004 and every subsequent visit I learned and saw something new.

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.