An old friend of mine grew the most glorious, flawless chrysanthemums for over twenty years at Kew Gardens. A highly skilled specialist, Bert lived for nothing else and he travelled all over the country talking about them and judging them. Suddenly in the 1970s he developed an allergy to them. His eyes swelled up and closed every time he entered a glasshouse containing chrysanthemums. They gave him blisters and eventually he could not go within a mile of them.
I often think how lucky most of us are to be able to stick our faces into a vase of this or that without any such effects. Like Bert, I also like chrysanthemums, have handled them for years without any such ill effect (so far) and in fact have two pots of them on my desk at this moment, the plants being between 15” and 18” tall.
The yellow variety has a mass of flowers with diameters of about 2-2½″, while the snow-white variety has slightly smaller flowers. Chrysanthemums have a very distinctive smell and to me are more evocative of cooler climates like China and Japan (its national flower), but of course they can be grown in many other regions as well.
Chrysanthemums are prone to about fifteen virus diseases, but now modern techniques of propagation keep them free of infection to the point of marketing. One interesting way of keeping them virus free in private gardens is to avoid using a knife to make cuttings. The way now is to just snap/break suitable shoots off when they are 2-2½″ long (the perfect length), treat them with rooting powder and stick them into rooting composts. No trimming is involved at all. At no time is the knife used, and therefore at no time is a virus passed from one variety to another by an infected knife. Modern techniques of production have to take into account the fact that chrysanthemums flower in autumn and early winter. If you want to make them flower at any other time you have to make them think it’s autumn again by controlling the light they get. In this way growers can get them to flower when they are only a foot or two high.
Nowadays nearly all chrysanthemums are marketed in plastic pots and grown in soil-less compost. The reason for the plastic pots is that commercial growers use automatic watering systems whereby the plants absorb water through the base of the pot. For this to be successful thin plastic has to be used rather than thick clay pots. The reason for the soil-less compost is that it is sterile and quite good under automatic watering systems because the particles are closer together. The problem always starts when the plants are marketed to people who do not have automatic watering systems, and don’t realise that soil-less composts require much less water than soil in clay pots. Note well that your plants will need special care, and probably you will find that lifting them carefully is the best way to gauge whether they are dry or wet.
Gloxinias are spectacular flowering plants that come from Brazil. The flowers are tubular; several inches across with a deep throat, and coloured red, purple, pink or white or a combination of all these colours. They have large leaves, need to be grown in the shade and kept out of strong breezes. Once they have finished flowering they should be gradually dried off and rested for a month or two. After this the tubers should be shaken out and potted either into the same size pot or into a larger one, placing the tubers just below the surface. When they start sprouting they may be fed with a weak liquid manure every week or two when they will once again produce their beautiful dark green leaves and magnificent flowers. They can incidentally be propagated from cuttings, rooted in sand, and covered with a clear plastic dish to prevent drying out.
May your God go with you wherever you are in our beautiful country.
