Tooting my own horn: Seemannia 'Little Red'

Seemannia 'Little Red' in my Washington, DC garden

I haven't worked with gesneriads for a couple of years so I got a bit of a thrill this morning when I found one of my own hybrids, Seemannia 'Little Red', listed for sale in the Fall 2015 catalog of Plant Delights Nursery.  Plant Delights is considered one of the premier nurseries for rare and unusual plants, so having one of my plants listed is a pretty big deal.

Garden Bloggers Bloom Day: August 2014

Okay, enough with the long blog posts for now!  It's time for a quick-and-dirty blog post with pretty pictures and not much else.  These are some of the plants I had blooming in my garden today.  For more information about any of them, feel fee to post questions in the comments section!  For many more photos, click here.  For more Garden Bloggers Bloom Day posts from all around the blogosphere, visit Carol at May Dreams Gardens.


Spigelia marilandica, second bloom after deadheading a few weeks ago


Spigelia marilandica


Asclepias tuberosa, also reblooming after deadheading


Honeybee on Asclepias tuberosa


Clerodendrum bungei, one of my beautiful monsters


Lobelia cardinalis, still going strong


Aralia elata has been dropping tiny white flowers all over everything for a month


When was the last time you took a close look at the flowers of Liriope muscari?


Begonia grandis 'Early Bird', my own early-blooming selection of the species


Hosta plantaginea, "August lily", night-blooming and wonderfully fragrant


Datura wrightii, last night


Datura wrightii, this morning


One more because I can't get enough of those daturas!


Morning glory (Ipomoea sp.), growing as a weed


Sphaerorrhiza sarmentiana (Gesneriaceae), blooming on my windowsill at work

400,000 views

Clerodendrum bungei

For Throwback Thursday, I'm looking back at some of the photos I've taken over the years.  I've been using Flickr to post and share my photos online since September 2007 and I've just passed 400,000 views on my DC Tropics Flickr account.  That's a pretty random milestone and I should note that I only checked it after a friend and fellow Flickr user announced that he had reached 10 million views.

So far I've posted almost 3,800 photos.  Many Flickr users have posted far more photos than that (my friend has over 62,000 photos posted) but like many of those users I'm not very happy with Flickr lately (suffice to say their ugly and clunky "new and improved" version sucks) but there are still some things I like about Flickr.

Credit where credit is due

Primulina (Chirita) 'Chastity', Green Spring Gardens conservatory

As an amateur plant breeder, I appreciated these comments by Kelly Norris as quoted by Allan Armitage in a recent article about the future of plant breeding in Greenhouse Grower magazine, Today's Breeders on Tomorrow's Plants:

"There are those coming of out graduate school who end up toiling away with petunias and commodity crops. I feel for them," he says.  "Then there are those of us in 'private practice' (a.k.a. unpaid hobby breeding) or working for public institutions that don't have to live by the rules.  We take risks, run into road blocks (like lack of funding or time) and fail more than we succeed.  But we are passionate and believe in what we encounter in the public — an earnest desire to be fascinated by plants and to want something different than what they so often encounter.  It's this class of breeders that stand the chance of advancing the cause of plant breeding because they are champions of new genera."

×Gloximannia 'She's Dancing'

 

What the heck is a ×Gloximannia?  (The "×" or multiplication sign, indicating an intergeneric hybrid, is not pronounced.)  In a previous blog post I discussed the gesneriad genus Seemannia, a close relative of Gloxinia.  Although these two genera look very different, they are closely enough related that their respective species can be easily crossed to produce viable hybrids.  And what do you get if you cross the two genera?  The nothogenus (hybrid genus) ×Gloximannia, of course.  To the best of my knowledge, only Gloxinia perennis has been used from that genus and the hybrids tend to take after this parent.  Neither of the other two species--Gloxinia erinoides and Gloxinia xanthophylla--have yet been crossed with any Seemannia species; it would be very interesting to see how such hybrids would turn out.

Seemannia: a gesneriad with commercial potential

Seemannia 'Little Red'

Seemannia is a small South American genus in the same family (Gesneriaceae) as african violets and gloxinias (and until recently Seemannia was included in the genus Gloxinia).  The species and a few hybrids (primarily my own) are in very limited cultivation, but I believe that with a bit of tweaking they may have some commercial potential as bedding and container plants.  (Photo: Seemannia 'Little Red', one of my own hybrids)

Welcome to DCTropics

I'm a botanist and gardener in Washington, DC.  As a botanist, my research specialty is the plant family Gesneriaceae and I have authored or co-authored several papers on subject (although my current duties are primarily collections & data management).  I work almost exclusively with pressed, dried, brown, and quite dead plants so when I come home I want to see something green and growing!  My horticultural interests are eclectic and wide-ranging and include gesneriads, begonias, hardy palms, and just about anything else that's tropical or exotic. I've also been an amateur plant breeder for over 25 years and have produced numerous cultivars in the gesneriad genera Sinningia, Primulina (formerly Chirita), Kohleria, and Seemannia (formerly Gloxinia) as well as a smattering of others, including some intergenerics.  In the last few years my interests have turned more towards Begonia with the primary goal of producing hardy begonia hybrids.

I've always been interested in growing unusual and exotic plants, and particularly "zone-pushing", testing the limits of plants that may or should be hardy in my region (USDA hardiness zone zone 7a/b).  I’m the organizer/admin of two online gardening groups, DCTropics (Yahoo) and MidAtlantic Tropics (Facebook).  I also have an extensive photo album on Flickr although you can still find some of my older photos in Photobucket.  Here are some of my most popular photos on Flickr (and don’t ask me how Flickr decides which are the most “interesting”).

Finally, here's a view of my garden as seen from our roof deck, taken just this morning (and yes, those are our neighbor's garbage cans; we live in an urban rowhouse with a very narrow lot and it's sometimes hard to hide things like that...):