Psycho for cyclamen

I'm nuts about hardy cyclamen. How nuts? Well... Here is a picture of a shirt my oldest brother made for me one Christmas when I was 16 or so.

Yeah... I was so obsessed with cyclamen and wouldn't stop talking about them so he made me this shirt... It is rather faded with age, but I still love it -- and cyclamen!

C. coum was my first love, because it flowers so incredibly early (the same time as snowdrops for me). Like most gardeners, my love of flowers was soon overtaken by an obsession with foliage. Which C. coum also does pretty darn well.

But C. coum, as lovely as it is, now decidedly takes second place to C. hederifolium

Now THAT is pretty epic foliage diversity!

Not only does the amount and pattern of silver vary wildly, leaf shape is crazy too. I love the long leaf forms we've got at Arrowhead. Stock is low at the moment, but I've sown a massive amount of seed, and we should have more before too long.

C. hederifolium wins for me also for its performance in the garden. C. coum is hardy, but never seems to really thrive for me, while C. hederifolium gets beefy and happy and even seeds around a little.

The flowers are pretty epic as well, coming up in huge numbers in the early fall just before the leaves.

White is even better than the normal pink, to my taste anyway.

Most excitingly, to me anyway, we've for some really cool new cyclamen forms coming along here at Arrowhead... Looking through a seedling batch of C. hederifolium, I spotted a few individuals that show a distinct PINK flush to their leaf surfaces!

Admittedly, the pink color isn't that extreme yet, but if this is what is just popping up from open pollinated seed from our stock plants, I'm very hopefully that a little focused breeding and selection will be able to produce a whole new class of brilliant pink flushed C. hederifolium. Stand by! They're going to be all kinds of awesome.

Also cool this year is this C. coum seedling with MASSIVE leaves! Normal sized leaves are at the top for comparison... I'm hoping the flowers are similarly jumbo, and that it comes true from seed. We shall see.

Finally, there is the one that got away...

How incredibly kick ass is this VARIEGATED C. coum? Sadly, it is also incredibly dead. :( That is the depressing bit about variegated plants... they can be easy to kill, hard to propagate, and once gone, there's no way to bring them back. I'm look through every seedling batch of C. coum carefully, hoping against hope that this gorgeous thing will rear its head again, but chances are it won't... Ah well. We can always dream.

Cyclamen hederifolium

I adore Cyclamen hederifolium. Those leaves...

 They come up in late summer or early fall, when everything else is going down hill, and last well into the spring, looking amazing for me from at very least from October to May -- the very period of time that is hardest to keep looking good in my climate. What's more, they perform like this in the dry shade under my maples, not minding the absolute lack of water in the summer since they're dormant then anyway. They flower too, very profusely in September and October. I like the flowers, but the leaves are so much lovelier that I realize I don't even have any photos of the flowers.
There is a lot of variability in the leaf patterning. Arrowhead Alpines has a wide range of leaf types, and I love going and picking out my favorites.
This is one I picked out this spring. I love the complexity of the patterning.

I also love their silver leaved strains, where the silver covers almost the entire leaf. They are not as cool up close, but make a better statement from a distance.

Hardy cyclamen grow from a big, flat corm, but unlike the corms of crocuses, they don't divide. They just keep getting bigger and bigger every year. The picture above was a plant I purchased last year. Here is what it looks like this year:

Since they don't divide, pretty much the only way to get more is to buy them (which gets expensive) or to start them from seed. I always get a few self-sown seedlings, like this little two year old plant:

But I've had terrible luck starting seeds myself. I know the seeds require absolute darkness to germinate, but everytime I've ordered seeds and tried starting them, I get miserable germination rates. This year, however, I had great success. I decided to imitate nature, so I collected seeds as soon as they ripened on my plants -- the middle of this summer. (surprisingly, the seeds take almost an entire year to ripen.) and sowed them in pots right away. I'd read that absolute darkness is a must, and even a little light can stop germination, so I put the pots in a plastic bag to keep the moist, and shoved them in a box. Then I watched my plants outside. I figured the seeds would be germinating at about the same time the plants ouside were puttig up their leaves. Dispite my temptation, I didn't open the box and let light in, until my plants outside were looking stunning. Then I opened the box and...

Seedlings! I've got two more pots like this, totally maybe100 little seedlings. I'll let these guys over winter outside in a sheltered nook, then divide them up into individual pots once they go dormant next summer. I can't WAIT to see what leaf patterns they have as they mature. I'm not sure what the critical factor for success was -- I'm guessing it was the combination of very fresh seeds that hadn't dried out, and matching the timing to their natural growth cycle. In anycase, now I know how to get lots more cyclamen, which makes me very happy. I might buy a few other species this year, so I can harvest fresh seed from them as well. Because I think it is physically impossible to have too many hardy cyclamen. Or most any other plant, but especially cyclamen.