Daubenya

[Ali Baba]

That’s curious, the Kew description on line describes the flowers as 3cm long including the spur. Mine are 25mm. Perhaps the difference is in cultivation, I only got mine last year so still a relatively small plant (although up in the eaves of the greenhouse already from the pot on the ground)

[Terry S.]

It might just be an example of natural variation. I had a quick Google and it looks as though it has a long distribution area in the mountains through Chile from the north to the central areas. I have had my tubers for a very long time. It is a stock that has circulated amongst AGS members in the south of England and invariably vegetatively propagated from the offset tubers. It is the sort of thing that appears in raffles at our local Group. I repot in August every couple of years and put a group of pea sticks into the pot that make a wig-wam to about 40cm high. When I start watering at the beginning of September, the very thin stems ramble through the pea sticks and those that try to escape are just tucked back into the framework. The pot is grown through the winter in a greenhouse that goes down to about 3C and flowering with me is usually from mid-March onwards. A pot grown like this is quite spectacular when in full flower which is why I queried the earlier comments about squinny flowers.

[Terry S.]

Apologies. I sometimes get irritated by members going off-topic and I have just done that. In recompense I have images of a few more daubenyas. The genus only contained D. aurea for a long time, on the basis that the genus was defined by the well-developed outer petal of one floret, a bit like the ray florets on Asteraceae. Most of the other species were in Massonia and the transfers were made to Daubenya largely on the basis of DNA work. The only macro feature for Daubenya is the lateral grooves in the leaves.

Daubenya marginata which grows with D. aurea and often comes up instead of it from wild-collected seed:

Daubeya zeyheri from the west coast:

Daubenya comata which gets into the summer-rainfall area:

Daubenya aurea red form photographed in the wild by a friend:

[ralphrmartin]

Just to terminate the diversion, I guess the flowers on my Tropaeoleum are 2cm long if you include the spurs, so not that small. It's also a young plant. The leaves have died off as the plant was left dry for the last 3 weeks while I was on holiday.

Anyway, getting back on topic, as for Daubenyas - I've got a couple (stylosa, zeyheri) which are growing well but have not flowered so far, even though I have had a good show of flowers on my Massonias this year. All my South African bulbs are in the unheated part of the greenhouse which has probably got down close to freezing, if not below on a few nights.

[Astro]

I am growing most of the Daubenya species from seed, all except namaquensis (never seen it on offer, is this even a proper species?), capensis (I have some seeds to be sown at the end of the year) and marginata, which stubbornly refuses to show even though I've tried it a few times.
I think I may be sowing it too early when temperatures are still too high, and the seeds die (in the damp soil) before temperatures drop enough. I sowed it along with aurea (presumably similar requirements?) last Fall, and while I have a large number of aurea seedlings, no marginata ever showed. Maybe marginata seeds are not as robust as aurea seeds.
I dug up some seeds and they all seemed dead. I have no reason to suspect the seed was bad, given my track record with the species and the seed's provenance (Gordon Summerfield).

[Terry S.]

Gordon Summerfield once offered D. namaquensis seed but I didn't succeed with it. It seems to be very rare in the wild, confined to a couple of Bushmanland farms east of Springbok. There is little if any D. capensis in the UK, some seed offered of that species produced D. stylosa.