Hello, and thanks for visiting. This website chronicles my adventures with winter-growing bulbs, especially the genus Moraea. I've been breeding Moraea hybrids on and off for more than a decade, and this article discusses my favorite new hybrids from 2025. Enjoy!
Rich colors
Sometimes a hybrid will stand out because its colors are especially vibrant or unusual. Here are a couple of examples:
MM 20-222a. This is an extremely nice flower made by crossing M. villosa form o with a hybrid that had extremely dark purple styles (the three flange-shaped things in the middle of the flower). As you can see, their offspring below has vivid magenta styles which contrast nicely with the blue eyes and yellow central cup. Click on the link above for more photos and details.
GK 2111_14. I like bright colors, and so I make a lot of crosses between vividly-colored flowers. Sometimes that works, and sometimes it produces something I didn't expect. For example, some of the bright-colored crosses have produced hybrids that have pastel colors, in shades of pink, orange, and violet. They weren't what I expected, but several people have said they like them, and I have to admit they're growing on me. The plants all include M. villosa form o mixed with other hybrids. The photo below is a good example of the pastel hybrids, a cross bred by Garry Knipe. For another example see MM 18-316.
MM 22-213a. I think this is a beautiful flower, with its vivid blue eyes and streaky dark purple veins. It rewards close examination...
If you zoom in on the photo below you can see that the flower is minutely speckled in blue, violet, and red. Very nice!
Unusual markings
MM 21-142a. This flower is remarkable -- not just for its pinstripe veins, but also for the luscious shades of orange and pink in the central cup, overlaid with pale yellow hairs. Zoom in close on the photo and you'll see what I mean.
MM 21-142d. Believe it or not, this is a sibling of the flower above. Instead of faint pinstripes, this hybrid has dark blue blotches along the veins. The blue streaks appear in the styles as well.
MM 22-43a. For me, this flower is a breakthrough. There are a number of Moraea species that have yellow eyes, but typically the eyes are small and the tepals are pale blue. This one is striking because of the big yellow eye, precise dark border around it, and the snowy white color of the tepals and style crests. It really stands out.
MM 22-162a. For about a decade I've been gradually breeding hybrids with speckled "smoke" rings around the eye. This one is especially vivid. (And has nice green eyes, too.)
MM 22-146b. This is a mangled flower. I hope the imperfections are just a one-year issue rather than something genetic, because the colors in this hybrid are awesome: a bright orange central cup, turquoise eye, and purple splashes on a white background.
Dots, dots, and more dots
There aren't a lot of spotted flowers in the Moraea species that I use for my hybrids (subgenus Vieussieuxia). But photos taken by people like the late Colin Patterson-Jones show that spots occasionally show up in several species in the wild. I've found that the spotted characteristic appears to be mostly recessive, so you have to cross spotted plants with each other if you want to see more spots. That's what I have been doing, and it's paying off.
MM 20-240a. This one brings together several characteristics that I like: clean white tepals, lots of dots, and bright eyes. I am very happy.
MM 17-10f. When it first bloomed in 2020, MM 17-10a was one of the most heavily spotted hybrids I had ever bred. I had some leftover seeds from that cross, so I planted the rest of them in 2021. This is the first flower from those saved seeds, and it has even more spots than 17-10a. Let's hear it for saving seeds!
MM 20-179c. Last year MM 20-179a was one of my favorite new hybrids of the year, a triangle-shaped flower with mystical streaky purple coloring. I wasn't sure if it would be fertile, so I was anxious to do more breeding with it in the future. This year I confirmed that it's fertile, and even better, a couple of its siblings bloomed for the first time. I think this is the nicest one:
MM 19-23b. A very nice mix of vivid blue eyes, spots, and bright orange tepals.
MM 22-211a. This is turning out to be a great cross. It combined a heavily spotted flower with one that has patterned smoke rings around the eye. The photo you see below is the most colorful offspring from the cross, but every plant in this cross is different and beautiful. Click on the link above to see its fabulous siblings.
MM 20-329a. I will close with one of the weirdest Moraea hybrids I've ever bred. It reminds me of one of those "ugly dog" contests where the dogs are all so homely-looking that they're irresistible. I am fascinated by the strange crater spots all over these flowers. The spots are purple-colored but have a silvery metallic sheen to them, and some of them look to be embossed into the tepals. It's something I have never before seen in the genus. Click the link above for more images and closeups.
Want to see more flowers?
This year I photographed about 130 new crosses that bloomed for the first time, plus about a hundred new siblings from older crosses. To see all the photos, use the nav buttons at the bottom of this post to look at older posts. Or if you're on a computer, there's a sidebar on the right that'll let you navigate directly to things.
Thoughts on 2025
In 2024, my growing beds were attacked by waves of rodents: ground squirrels during the day, voles in the evening, and mice and rats at night. I tried baiting and traps, but I wasn’t able to get the problem under partial control until I put galvanized hardware cloth onto the tops of every bed.
I saved most of my favorite crosses, and the most recent hybrid beds were not affected. So I can keep going with the hybridization program, but still it was a painful experience. The moral of the story: If you grow South African bulbs close to the countryside, like I do, you need to armor your pots and beds against rodents. And maybe convince a feral cat to hang out at your place.
About my breeding program
I started my bulb collection in the 1990s, raising them in 8-inch (20-cm) pots. Eventually the pots became hard to maintain, so I started moving my plants into raised beds, which are much easier to care for (less repotting, etc). I now have about 16 beds, and add about one more each year (for more on the beds, click here).
Over the years I've tried growing hundreds of bulb species from summer-dry climates around the world: California, South Africa, Chile, etc. Many of these bulbs are unusual and beautiful, and I encourage you to try them. I've found that the Moraeas are especially rewarding -- they're relatively easy to grow in my climate in San Jose, CA, most of them are brightly colored, and many of the prettiest species can be hybridized to make unique new flowers.
I make about 400-600 hybrid crosses each year, which produce about 200-300 seed pods.
Some people look down on hybridizing – they feel it distracts from preserving species. I don't agree. I do my best to preserve and share Moraea species, but there are only so many species you can obtain. If I want to see new flowers every year, I need to cross them.
I am not a botanist and I'm making up my hybridization program as I go along. I welcome suggestions and other advice.
My Moraea wish list
There are about twenty more Moraea species that should be compatible with the ones I’ve been breeding, but most have never been available in commerce. Just this year I became aware of a new source that carries seeds of many of those species -- or anyway, that's what they claim. It seems too good to be true, but I ordered some seeds from them anyway, and the seeds are now planted. In about three years I'll be able to tell you what happened.
In the meantime, I am still looking for additional seeds or pollen of the species listed below. I believe many of them are privately grown. If you know of sources for seed or pollen of any of them, I am very happy to trade or pay. To be clear, I am not soliciting illegal collection from the wild or anything else improper. I’d just like to be in touch with other growers who are willing to share. You can see my wish list here.
Free seeds
I am glad to share seeds of Moraea hybrids and species with anyone who’s interested. There’s no charge. Much of my collection was given to me by others, so I am trying to continue their generosity. If you’re interested, send me a note at the email address here. Include your name, mailing address, and how many seeds you'd like. Also let me know which of the hybrids you like best. I can't send seeds of those exact plants because they are not generally self-fertile, but I can pick out hybrids that are similar to what you like. I send seeds in late autumn of each year California time. (Note that I don't distribute corms. It's too much work, and besides I usually have only one specimen of each hybrid.)
Thank you
Many people have helped me build my bulb collection, including Paul F. X. Von Stein, Garry Knipe, Jim Duggan, Gordon Summerfield, Cameron and Rhoda McMaster, Rod and Rachel Saunders, Mary Sue Ittner, and the members of the Pacific Bulb Society, International Bulb Society, and the Indigenous Bulb Growers of South Africa. Plus many more people I've forgotten to list. Thank you all.
I also owe a huge debt to the late Bob Werra, the leading grower of Moraea in the US (and probably the world). Bob was a sweet, smart, and very enthusiastic person who took great delight in the intricate and beautiful details of these plants. A strong advocate of conservation through cultivation, he gave me much of his collection when he became too old to maintain it. He was a constant source of seeds, corms, and sage advice to anyone who asked.
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