Primulinas in Bloom !

Just to prove it isn't all about orchids all the time, I thought I'd share some other stuff that is in bloom at the moment and on this occasion, the Primulina are the starts of the show. Primulina are relatives of the Streptocarpus and saintpaulia which many people are familiar with. At least under my conditions, they are easier to grow than either of them. They come from the cooler parts of Asia and seem well suited to our climate here in the UK. They aren't typically grown outside as their cold-hardiness hasn't been properly tested out and there is no way they wouldn't be a gourmet banquet to any passing army of molluscs. They are excellent houseplants for a cool lightly shaded windowsill, though.  They may be either rosulate like a Saintpaulia (they actually all grow a stem, but some species/hybrids possess shorter stems than others), or they may grow into what looks like a Bonsai tree with a tuft of leaves above a bare stem. I find both forms quite attractive with the flowers just being an added bonus.

First up is Primulina tamiana, a charming little species which the most strongly resembles a saintpaulia at least when out of flower with its coin shaped slightly hairy leaves on a longish stem. In fact, it is often referred to as the Vietnamese violet. The flower stems are held well clear of the foliage and bear a few flowers that open sequentially over a couple of weeks. The flowers are individually short lived (as with most gesneriads) but are produced over an extended period.

A charming species all round. Flowers can appear at any time of the year but usually the plant blooms during the warmer months, probably as the day-length increases. I go this plant as a clump in a community pot but I think this looked quite untidy when it was out of bloom as I couldn't really see the individual rosettes. I separated them and potted them on separately and now a couple of them are producing flowers.

Primulina 'Erika' Unfortunately with Primulinas, there doesn't seem so much information out there about what species these named cultivars have come from . With orchids it is very simple to find information about a plant if you have its correct name. Not so with other plants unfortunately, and Primulina is no exception. All this means is that I have no idea of this plant's parents or whether it is a named variety of one of the species. It's not that important in the grand scheme of things, but I do like to know.

Have a Google for Primulina Erika. Go on. Look at that, the second entry was written by me! If you look through the rest of the entries you will also see how little information there is out there on these plants, especially if you want it in English. I guess they just haven't caught on quite yet, probably due to the popularity of their more famous cousins.

I've only had this plant just over a year, but it looks like in time it will produce a tuft of leaves on top of a sturdy stem. Some growers, I've no doubt, won't like this and will want to either keep burying the stem lower and lower to keep the rosette at soil level (as you would with a Saintpaulia if you keep it alive that long) or just lop the rosette of with a couple of centimetres of stem and re-root it. I have done this in the past (with other cultivars, not this one) and it works just fine, but I actually prefer them to take on their adult persona and I have never thought they looked ugly with a length of bare stem. Leaves are shed from the base at about the same rate as they are produced from the top, and there doesn't seem to be any way of preventing this, meaning that whatever you do you will end up with bare stem eventually. Let it happen, I say.

A nice tidy plant, as you can see. The next set of leaves are ready to drop, I'll snap them off once they yellow a bit more. The flowers are held nice and high above the plant, and remind me of candelabra, especially when they are in bud. The narrower leafed forms of Primulina are to me much neater in appearance than many of the broad leafed ones, though I guess its a matter of personal taste.

Primulina 'Candy'. A nice clear pastel pink flower. Again, no real idea on the actual parentage of this. My guess would be that its a sport of another hybrid, to be honest. Once again, not the general lack of information available. I wonder if this is a sport of 'Chastity' (coming later in this post). This is its first proper season of producing flowers, and I'm sure subsequent stems will hold the flowers further away from the foliage. There are more stems coming, I looked. This is a broader leaved variety, but not enough to make it untidy. I would say it is slightly less vigorous than some other varieties.

This one seems to be more prone to producing offsets from the main stem so probably won't develop the bare stem that some varieties do. If all these offsets produce flowers too, it will make quite an impressive show in future seasons. Or I might decide to remove them, root them and pot them up separately. I haven't really decided, yet.

Now, believe it or not, this one doesn't actually have a name. It is very similar to P. 'Aiko' in the flowers, but the foliage is much neater, darker and more compact. I got this plant a few years ago now at a garden centre (not local to me) when visiting family, and I spotted this almost straight away. It was very cheap and a nice full plant but didn't have a name, not even Chirita (what is now known as Primulina used to be part of genus Chirita, but the true Chiritas are quite different). There were several rosettes growing in one pot making the plant nice and full looking, but as discussed earlier, I find multiple rosettes in one pot rather untidy looking. I didn't do anything with it for some time until fate intervened and I put the plant outside to spend the summer which resulted in the dreaded vine weevil completely destroying the root system and almost killing the plant altogether. As a last ditch attempt to save it, I de-potted it and divided it up in to separate rosettes (so I could get all the old potting medium away from it, and any rogue vine weevil larvae or eggs would have nowhere to hide. Not one of the rosettes had any leaves, poor things. Not being one to give up that easily, I put each separate rosette in a pot of its own with nice new potting mix, put them on a shaded window sill and left them pretty much to their own devices, expecting them to die. Instead, they all rooted and grew away much better than they ever had before. I have now sold all but one of them, and this is the plant I have left.

Nice and tidy. The flowers are quite large on this one, and are held nicely above the foliage. Each leaf (on all Primulina) seems only capable of producing one flower spike, so it is essential to keep the plants growing so they produce more new leaves and in turn flower spikes from the leaf axils. 

Finally in our little sojourn through Primulina town we have P. 'Chastity'. I have been growing this one for years. It really is a tough, vigorous and prolific plant. This is one of those Primulina that produces a stem very quickly with a tuft (or tufts) of leaves on the top. I have found that the leaf size decreases as the plant gets taller but I don't know whether this is simply a result of the plant exhausting its potting medium. I really need to take the mother plant out of its pot and change its potting media, especially now I've chopped the rosettes off the top and rooted them separately. By 'rooted them separately' I mean hacked them off and stuck them in a pot on their own. Needless to say, they have all rooted. And the stumps are re-sprouting.

I'd like to say this is the mother plant. It isn't. This is a cutting I took off the mother plant last year and have now had to pot on. I think that is a 13cm pot I've put it in now. This hybrid/cultivar or whatever it is is capable of producing quite a lot of flowers. The main drawback with 'Chastity' for me is that it pongs! It's not that the flowers pong, the whole plant does. Its almost as if the plant is producing some kind of smelly oil of some sort, presumably as a defence mechanism against something that likes to eat it. Luckily, it only smells if you mess with it, not if you just walk past.

So, what are my secrets to growing Primulina?

There aren't any really. They seem to be vigorous and easy going plants, on the whole. I have found that they grow better when given good drainage and the like to be kept on the dry side (not bone dry, you understand, but the surface of the compost should dry between one watering and the next). They definitely put on a growth spurt after the spring equinox, but you'd expect that given the extra light and (slightly) warmer nights. Regular repotting seems to benefit them, too, as does regular feeding. I usually like to put slow release fertilizer in the potting mix when I pot them on rather than use a liquid feed, but I can't imagine them being that fussy either way. Feeding certainly will give you more flowers and more often. A tomato feed used sparingly every two weeks should do the trick. They enjoy cool temperatures as do their relatives, the Streptocarpus, but they seem easy to get through the winter and don't look a mess during winter either as many Streptocarpus do.