South American Plants - Gloxinia

Name – This is one of those plants with two names. The other name is Sinningia, after Wilhem Sinning, a German botanist who did much of the work in hybridising the plant in the early 1900s. However, it is more popularly known as gloxinia.

Description – This family of plants all have large, velvety, trumpet-shaped flowers with ruffled or plain edges and a cluster of large felted leaves at the base of the stems. The blooms can be up to five inches in diameter and can remain in flower for up to eight to twelve weeks, in a colour range of white, pink, salmon orange, red, blue and violet.

Origins - There are around fifty different species and all, except for a few, have tubular flowers. New hybrids like Sinningia pafuflora has scented lilac flowers and there are also miniature cultivars such as the tiny Sinningia pusilla with lilac-pink flowers that are less than an inch in size. In the UK, this plant is nearly always grown as a house plant or greenhouse inhabitant. It needs warm and humid conditions with bright light and frequent watering, but you need to understand the plant’s physiology, it needs to be irrigated from the bottom and you mustn’t mist either the flowers or leaves – so don’t place it in a greenhouse with overhead sprinklers or automatic misters because too much sun and water on the leaves causes much of the trouble experience with this plant, which is rot and leaf damage. In addition, because it is such a prolific flowerer, you’ll need to feed the plant every fortnight during the flowering season for it to give of its best. To keep the plant in perfect shape, pot up new tubers in February and keep them in a warm shady spot. Supply abundant moisture and, as the buds appear, remember to feed with liquid fertilizer from the bottom only. After flowering, dry off the tubers slowly and store them in the dark, preferably at a temperature not above 5 degrees Celsius – it’s also worth bearing in mind that Gloxinias can easily be increased by leaf cuttings.

South American Gloxinia photograph by Joe Shlabotnik, used under a creative commons attribution licence

 

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