Strelitzia, the Crane flower, the Bird of Paradise – what a set of names for one plant. I don’t know why I’m so fascinated with them. It’s a combination of its names, exoticness, rarity and its flowers, which can take over five years to appear, from seed. This is not a plant for the impatient.
Sowing the Seed
In 2010, I got several seeds of Strelitzia Reginae, which has orange flower petals and also Strelitzia Mandela’s Gold, which has yellow, from an online store around Autumn. In hindsight, this was pretty much the worst time of year to buy these seeds. Strelitzia usually flowers around Winter and sets seed in later Winter, so these seeds could have been almost a year old and for Strelitzia, the fresher the seed, the better.
The sowing instructions were very thorough – especially about pre-soaking the seeds and keeping the soil warm and moist for germination – unfortunately, this was winter and so pots went into the airing cupboard where temperatures fluctuated quite a bit depending on when the hot water and central heating was on. They were chilled and cooked several times on a daily basis. Strelitzia can take some time to germinate and I got impatient and would often rummage in the pots to see whether anything was happening too.
I pretty much did everything the wrong way, but I was new, naive and somewhat foolish and it showed. Out of the several seeds that I sowed, only one germinated, and I have treated it like the most precious thing since.
If I were to sow Strelitzia again, here’s what I would do:
- Wait until well into summer, when it starts getting really warm outside
- Get several seeds, since germination is very hit-and-miss, the more seeds you have, the better the chances you’ll get something
- Soak the seeds in water for a few days to a week.
- Prepare a pot (or pots depending on how many seeds you have) of soil, dunk it in water till totally wet through and leave the excess to drain overnight
- Sow the seeds in the soil, about 1 cm deep
- Place pot(s) in the green house or in full sun
- Be patient and keep moist, don’t let the soil dry out
- Hope for germination
You can also increase your chances of germination by carefully scratching the tough outer coating of the seed halfway through soaking and using a temperature controlled propagator.
2010-2011
Since it was winter, the seedling was kept indoors where it very slowly grew its first seed-leaf, and then after an inordinate amount of time, grew the second. Unfortunately, as the soil was kept moist it caught a bad case of Sciarid fly and I had to keep a polythene bag over the whole pot to keep the flies inside.
I tried treating the flies by spraying them, which sort-of worked but a mass of dead flies and insecticide funnelled down the second seed leaf – which was just unfurling at the time – and this caused its stem to rot and turn black and in a few short weeks, I managed to halve what took months to grow as that leaf dropped off.
I bit the bullet and carefully spooned out the young seedling – which was under siege from flies and their larvae – washed it and placed it into a much more appropriate sized pot. I saw that the amount of growth below the soil was much more than above when I accidentally broke the thick tap root after several inches, not realising it would be that long.
So, flies, larvae, rotted leaf, broken root, re-potted and still a seedling. It sat there with one leaf for a very long time, it felt like months, it just didn’t change. I put it in the greenhouse after the last frosts and continued to care for it but only really looked at it every few weeks. It was in mid-summer that I suddenly noticed another leaf beginning to emerge and I was very excited and relieved that my Strelitzia was still hanging on and was having another go.
This new leaf grew, then unfurled after a few weeks and then another emerged and grew and then another. The tap root soon appeared at the bottom of the pot so I potted it on, there are several leaves now, but it still really is a seedling.
With the colder night temperatures I keep it out during the day to get the last of the Autumn sunshine but bring it in at night.
