 |
The pink flowered form of Roscoea scillifolia is an attractive plant. The relatively small clear pink flowers are fairly distinctive (but not unique) in the genus. The plants
grow rapidly, divide readily and flower easily. The flowers set seed freely, even in a closed greenhouse where I assume there are few natural pollinators, so I assume they manage to self pollinate.
The plants flower in july, and will produce a sedondary flush of flowers in september or later. Seedling sown during April, pricked out rather belatedly in July, flowered in September. This enthusiasm to propagate makes the pink form much more widespread in cultivation than the black. Jill Cowley says: "This species has been known for many years in the horticultural trade in its pink form as 'alpina'. It may well be endangered in the wild, because it is known only from a limited area where recent efforts to find it growing have failed. The exact collecting data for the two colour forms depicted here is not known, but, according to an article written by Cowan (The New Flora and Silva, (11)1: (17-28). 1938). the original wild stock from which the cultivated plants derive was collected in China by Forrest. There are certainly herbarium specimens in existence collected by him in which the two colour forms are mounted on a single sheet, suggesting that they came from the same population. The herbarium specimens used to describe what is now known as Roscoea scillifolia were collected in 1887 and 1888 by Delavay from Yunnan Province in China, at Hee-chan-men near Dali, a popular destination for present day tourists... The type material included three forms, white, rose and the deeppurple one, which Delavayi described as "red (rouges)". This species could be extinct in the wild. The last known collections were made at the beginning of the 20th Century, in mountains to the east of the Yantze river loop and further south, in the Yulong Shan area around Lijiang. Plants grew in open, stony, moist mountain pastures between 2740 and 3350m, and flowered from June to August." |
|
