A winner discovered growing on the pavement - Toy Jennings' Ella van Zijl

I met Toy Jennings in 1998. Her love for clivia opened my eyes and after my first visit to her house I really become excited about growing clivias. She had a big collection of clivia with colours ranging from dark red, yellow, apricot, guava, orange etc. Many prize winners come from her collection and her clivia has won many prizes over the years. I can still remember the very first clivia I bought from het was a broad leaf cyrtantiflora with purplish flowers.

As a matter of fact, after a few visits, I was infected by a terrible disease called the clivia disease which forced me to have a relook at my clivia collection. Toy inherited a beautiful collection of clivia built up by her mother, Edna Jennings, over many years in 1980. When her mother died she had to look after her mother's friend Ella van Zijl, maiden surname Green, who was living in Pretoria. When she died in 1986 Toy noticed two clivias growing next to the pavement in front of her house and asked the gardener to remove them to add them to her collection. Big was the surprise when they flowered that year at her house.

Although the flowers open orange, the colour transforms into a pinkish silver. Apart from the beautiful flower colour, the flower petals curl back and the flower head forms a round ball, called by some clivia growers in the Cape a posie. This plant was in flower at the very first Clivia show being held in Pretoria in the early nineties and won the Best on Show prize. Over the years it has won more first prices at clivia shows in other parts of South Africa. Toy also discovered an almost similar plant which belonged to professor Jurie Geldenhuys of Pretoria which she named after him. Toy has listed both these plants to be auctioned at this year's international clivia conference in Cape Town.
  

Big...bigger...best - the love for large flowers

Hippeastrum is my first love. Long before I started to hybridise clivia, the colourful large flowers of hippeastrum fascinated me. Their drawback is only a few flowers per head. I was always wondering what clivias will look like with large flowers. When I started growing clivia I was always on the lookout for clivia with large flowers and pollinating them with each other. It is important to select clivia with flat open flowers with petals that do not curl back. I think the potential is there to breed clivia flowers with a flower diameter of close to 18cm in the future. Many of my clivia with large flowers has petals which is longer than 9cm. I will never know their true potential, because in the area where I grow clivia I am limited to give them only leaf feeding to prevent fungal rot in summer.

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Balls of Fire! - Brunsvigia orientalis - West Coast - Western Cape - South Africa

I took these photos one day when returning back to Cape Town from a meeting in Vredenburg. Although I was in a hurry, I could not resist to stop and take a few photos. The flowerheads are huge and they can be seen from far. What is amazing of these flowers is that they flower just before the winter rain arrive, usually in March. The fleshy seed develop very quickly and can even get roots while on the flower head, because that time of the year misty conditions in the late afternoon and early mornings supply enough moist for them to germinate. Please note that I do not grow these bulbs, because the weather and soil conditions differ too much from each other in the southern and western cape to grow them successfully from seed. I have tried many years ago and has given up.  

Clivia miniatures - small, beautiful, rare and expensive

Above is a full grown plant with ideal dimensions grown under normal conditions the past 4 years in George. The photo was taken earlier this year. The leaf width is 9cm and the leaf length is also 9cm, giving it the ideal ratio of 1:1. As you can see from the photo above, the leaves are circular because of these ideal dimensions. It can be called a true round leaf. It grow as fast as any normal clivia, pushing out new leaves at a regular rate.

In 2006 when I visited Mr Zhu Jifu in Shenyang he has given me four miniature seedlings. Two of them variegated and the other two green leaves. At that time it was a new creation of Mr Zhu and he told us the price of a full grown broad leaf miniature is approximately 100000 RMB. These plants seldom flower, and if they flower it might be out of season. Of these four plants none has flowered up to date. Unfortunately this rare and beautiful plant did not escape the locust attacks earlier this year, despite of me entering the shade house a couple of times a day to get rid of them. This beautiful plant is now reduced to something worthless, but it will recover soon as only the leaves were damaged.

Above is another miniature that was given to me in 2006 by Mr. Zhu. This plant is even smaller than the one in the first photo with leaves only 3.5cm in length. The leaves are 5 cm wide as can be seen in the photos below.

Above photo was taken in 2006 when the plants were given to me as seedlings. They were at least one year old at that stage.  

   

Above - growing up as babies on my farm - their first leaves in South Africa

Above and below - growing quickly to become adults

Gardenii in flower on my farm in George, Garden Route, South Africa

My clivias had a terrible time the last two years, where they were first exposed to the wind and sun, moved between shade houses, completely neglected to survive on their own, because all our time was spend on building a new house and additional shade houses. On top of this we had almost no rain for the past year and a half - global warming of course, which made this past year the driest in living memory or at least the past 140 years in the Southern Cape. On top of that the drought brought a locust plague and the green shadehouses was like a magnet to them. They climbed and walked all over it to find an opening to get to the plants inside which was the only green plants left in the vicinity. Luckily flower bulbs which include clivias can survive long periods without water and their leaves are not that tasty. Despite all of this, some surprised me with beautiful flowers to draw my attention to them again.