Moraea Hybrids

I thought it would be a good idea to document my results so far with Moraea hybrids.  You can find mention of some hybrids in Goldblatt's book on Moraeas, but none of the hybrids are currently available commercially, and you can't find pictures of most of them online.

There's only one named Moraea hybrid that I'm aware of, a plant named "Zoe" raised by Bill Dijk in New Zealand.  Zoe is a hypnotic-looking flower heavily striped in purple.  It opened my eyes to what might be possible with the Moraeas.

This is a descendant of M. "Zoe."  It's not as stripey as the original, but still remarkable.

I've been crossing various Moraeas for several years now.  I haven't raised anything as pretty as Zoe, but I'm learning a lot, and some of the crosses are starting to look promising. 


MM 10-19 (In case you're wondering, the numbering scheme is my initials, followed by the year and then a number I assign to each cross when I plant them.  So MM 10-19 is the nineteenth cross I planted in fall of 2010.)

This is a new cross that bloomed for the first time in 2012.  It combines two common Moraea species from the Homeria group, Moraea flaccida and Moraea ochroleuca.  The result was a nice apricot-colored flower with a yellow center.  I wanted to cross these hybrids with themselves to bring out the recessive genes, but none of the crosses worked.  The pollen looks great, but the plants do not set seeds.  I also tried pollen from this on other Homeria species, with no success.

It was nice to see that this bloomed in only two years.  Most Moraea crosses take three years to bloom.


MM 99-00

This is the first cross I made, and probably the most boring.  I know one parent was the "neopavonia" form of Moraea tulbaghensis, but the tag broke and so I don't know the other parent.  It could be M. atropunctata or maybe M. loubseri.

Although this cross is not spectacular, it has led to some interesting children, as I'll show you below.


MM 03-04

This is one of several crosses I have done with Moraea aristata. In this case it was crossed with M. calcicola.  A pattern is starting to emerge -- the petals are a mix of white and whatever color the other parent has, while the nectar guide is not as spectacular as M. aristata.  This one cries out for an F2 cross, but the pollen is terrible (it looks like dried paint), and the plants are not not self-fertile.  Fortunately, in the last couple of years I've been able to cross pollen from some other species onto this one.  I can't wait for those to bloom.


MM 09-01

Another ourple and white cross, this time M. aristata and M. loubseri.  The petals on this one are pale purple, fading to almost white in the sun (as shown in this picture).  So far this one is a complete bust for follow-on crosses -- bad pollen, and it doesn't set seeds with anything.  However, Bob Werra identified some garden crosses of the two species, and they appear to be fertile.  So there may be hope.


MM 09-02

This was a surprise.  I was expecting the appearance to be a mix between the parents, M. villosa and M. aristata.  Instead, the hybrid looks almost exactly like M. villosa, but with a larger flower than the species (look at the US quarter next to it for comparison).  The size of the flowers is very exciting, but even better, they appear to be very fertile.  In 2015 I hope to have some interesting seedlings from them.


MM 03-98

One of my favorites.  Moraea atropunctata is a cream-colored flower with brown freckles at the center.  Cross it with the purple M. calcicola, and you get a flower with purple freckles.  It also has purple dots on the backs of the petals.  This hybrid blooms well, and sometimes sets seed.


MM 03-99

Moraea neopavonia crossed with M. villosa.  I wondered what would happen if you crossed a purple Moraea with an orange one.  The answer so far is that the orange color dominates.  However, I didn't keep track of the version of M. villosa that I used for the cross.  All I wrote was "weird Moraea villosa," meaning that I thought there was something funny going on with the color or shape of the flower.  Naturally, I've now forgotten exactly what was weird about the flower.

I am redoing this cross with better record-keeping.

In the meantime, this is a very handsome flower.  03-99A has wide petals like M. villosa, darker orange toward the center of the flower, and a big black nectar guide.  03-99B, which bloomed for the first time in 2012, has a similar but duller color scheme.  However, it sometimes gives me chimera flowers that have a flange growing out of the center of each petal.  I'm trying to make some follow-on crosses with this one.


MM 03-05

This one was a pleasant surprise.  I crossed Moraea aristata with the hybrid MM 99-00.  They produced a variety of flowers.  03-05A looks like a pale yellow version of M. aristata.  Unfortunately, it is not very fertile, but it does make a lot of offsets, so I hope I'll be able to share it around in a couple of years.

03-05C is pale orange with a narrow bluish nectar guide.  Not the most spectacular plant, but it blooms enthusiastically and sets seed well.  I hope it'll be the parent of some interesting follow-ons.

As you can see from the bottom photo, 03-05C produces some flowers with four petals.  This happens with about a quarter of the flowers.  I have no idea why it does this, or if I'll be able to breed the trait into anything else.  But I'll try.


MM 03-07

This is another cross made with MM 99-00, this time with Moraea villosa.  The flowers are medium orange, fading in the sun to the peach color you see here.  In 03-07A the nectar guide is relatively small, but there is a nice bright orange ring around it.

In 03-07b the petals are uniform color, but there's an outrageously big blue nectar guide in the middle.  There are also tiny maroon freckles on the backs of the petals.  This hybrid blooms enthusiastically for a long time, so it is one of my favorites.

These flowers have good-looking pollen and sometimes set seeds when crossed with other species.  But they will not breed with each other, unfortunately.


MM 09-04

This is my favorite surprise so far.  I crossed MM 99-00 with itself.  One plant looked a lot like the parent (so much so that I forgot to take a picture).  Another plant looked remarkably like M. neopavonia (see the center photo of MM 09-04C, battered by a hailstorm).  And then there's the third one, which came out a bright pure lemon yellow.  This was a big surprise, since at the time I made this cross I didn't have any yellow Moraeas in my collection.  So this is a genuine recessive characteristic coming out.  Better yet, this plant has fertile pollen and sets seeds easily.  So I can try to get that yellow color mixed with some other interesting things.

What I've learned

I'm just getting started with Moraea hybridization, so please treat all of this as preliminary guesses.  But based on what I've seen so far, I think...

--Crossing white and purple flowers yields pale purple flowers (in other words, one color does not dominate over the other).

--Crossing orange and purple produces orange flowers.  (Orange is mostly dominant.)

--Crossing a 24-chromosome Moraea (villosa, tulbaghensis) with a 12-chromosome Moraea (everything else) often produces fertile plants, something that is supposed to be almost impossible.

--Some of the hybrids show instability in their number and shape of petals.  I wonder if it might be possible to breed this tendency into producing fully double Moraea flowers.

--The books on plant breeding all tell you that the most important step is to create F2 hybrids.  (F1 is the first generation of the cross you make; F2 is when you breed those seedlings with themselves, or with each other.)  The F2 cross causes recessive genes to show themselves, producing a wide variety of results.  Unfortunately, most of my Moraea hybrids refuse to make F2 crosses.  Instead, you have to cross the F1 hybrid with another species.  That lets some recessives show up.

--Most of the "Peacock" group of Moraeas can be crossed with each other and with other plants closely related to the group.  Species that appear to be generally cross-compatible include Moraea aristata, calcicola, neopavonia, atropunctata, tulbaghensis, villosa, loubseri, tripetala, gigandra, lurida, unguiculata (maybe), 'Zoe,' and bellendenii.  Moraea fergusoniae and polystachya don't seem to be willing to cross with any of these, alas.

In the last couple of years I've been increasing he number of Moraea crosses I make.  But they take three years to bloom.  So you should expect to see up to 10 additional hybrids in 2013, and then a flood in 2014 and 2015.

Moraea gawleri Color Forms

I received these plants from a friend.

The typical forms of this flower are small and either pink or pale yellow with veins:

But a second form has shown up in the pot, with drooping bright yellow tepals and pure white, upright style crests:

As you can see below, it's also quite a bit larger than the usual form:

It's so different that I wonder if it's not some sort of accidental hybrid.  Any comments from the Moraea experts?

Moraea Hybrids Update 2012

It's was a very entertaining bloom season for the hybrid Moraeas in my garden.  Here are the highlights...

New Hybrids

Moraea flaccida x Moraea ochroleuca? (MM 10-19).  The seed parent is orange with a yellow center.  I crossed it with a pure yellow one (probably Moraea ochloreuca).  The result is a pleasant apricot-colored flower with a yellow center:

This is a nice plant, and as you can see below, an 8-inch (20 cm) pot of them makes quite a show. 

Note the interesting veining on the backs of the tepals.

This shot is backlit, which shows off the veins even better:

Unfortunately, these plants appear to be pretty thoroughly sterile. I've tried a lot of crosses with them this season, with absolutely zero success so far.  They have a lot of good-looking pollen, but it just doesn't do anything.

This is disappointing from a plant breeding perspective, but there is a silver lining.  It means this cross is probably safe to share broadly, without much worry about it turning into a weed.


Moraea aristata x loubseri (MM 09-01).  As you'd expect, this is halfway between the two parents.  The tepals are light violet when they open, but in the sun they eventually fade to almost-white.  Like several other M. aristata hybrids I've raised, this one produces very little pollen.  It also didn't set any seeds, despite numerous pollination attempts.

I am worried that this one may be a genetic dead end.  I'll keep trying to cross it for the next several years.

Moraea aristata x villosa (MM 09-02).  This one has the color scheme of Moraea villosa, but the tepals are paler, and the flowers are huge, about 30% larger than villosa.  They're the largest Moraea flowers I've ever seen.  I guess this is what you call hybrid vigor.

Although the flower below looks white, it's actually pale violet, a color that is hard to capture in a photo.

(MM 99-00 (Moraea neopavonia x atropunctata)) x MM 99-00 (MM 09-04).  This is my first F2 hybrid Moraea [F2 means that you created a hybrid (the F1 generation), and then crossed that hybrid back with itself].  This self-crossing causes recessive genes to come out, and every book I've read on the subject says the F2 generation is the one where you see the most unusual characteristics.  Many of my Moraea hybrids do not want to cross with themselves, so I was very happy to finally get an F2 flower.

And it was worth the wait.  The parent flowers are orange with a hairy center, like this:

  Self-pollinate them and what do you get?  Naturally, a bright lemon yellow flower!

(MM 09-04A)

Where the heck did that color come from??  I didn't own any yellow Moraeas when this cross was bred, so it's definitely some sort of recessive color gene(s) being expressed.  A second plant of this cross bloomed, and it looked similar to the one above but orange.  A third one turned out to look a lot like the parents.

MM 09-04A has a lot of pollen that makes seeds well with other Moraeas, and it sets seeds when pollinated with many things.  So I hope this won't be the last you see of this color in hybrid Moraeas.


Moraea villosa x neopavonia (MM 03-99B).  A sibling of this one bloomed last year, and it made a nice large orange flower with a black eye.  Note that the orange is a bit deeper toward the center of the flower.

(MM 03-99A)

That plant did not show up this year (which has me worried).  But a new sibling did, and is interesting in other ways.  Its flowers sometimes have weird flanges growing out of the middle of the tepals.  This appears to be a chimera, because other blooms on the same plant did not have flanges.

You wonder if there's some possibility to create a double Moraea.

(MM 03-99B)

This photo shows the same flower on the left several days later, faded by the sun, with another flower on the same plant but without the flanges.

Moraea villosa Color Forms

One of the things I'm learning about Moraea bulbs is that they don't like to be crowded.  If there are too many bulbs in the pot, most of them stop blooming.  As a result, when you repot some overcrowded bulbs, you have to be very careful about giving away the small "offsets."  They might just be offsets, or they might be old overcrowded clones that you thought you lost years ago.

This is especially true of Moraea villosa, because its colors are so varied.  One summer I spent time repotting some overcrowded Moraea villosa: a couple of pots that friends gave to me, and several pots that I had raised.  I tediously transferred all of the (many) bulbs into separate pots, six or eight bulbs to a pot.  I probably ended up with a dozen pots or more, and I thought I was probably wasting my time.  I figured I would end up with a bunch of pots of the same thing.

I was wrong.  I ended up with a bunch of new (to me) M. villosa color forms.

In the years since then I've continued to find new color forms popping up in the villosa pots. I have so many distinct forms now that I've started to give them individual letters, so I can track them for breeding and bulb exchange use.  In case you get some of my bulbs or seed, here's what the letters mean.

(By the way, I should add that I have no way of knowing if all of these flowers are natural forms of M. villosa. Many of these individuals have been in cultivation for more than a decade, and have passed through the hands of several growers. It's very possible that a passing bee could have crossed one of more of them with other Moraea species. If that happened, all it'd take would be for a single seed to fall into the villosa pot, and all of a sudden you'd have a "new" color form. On the other hand, if you take a look at the diversity of natural M. villosa forms shown on the iNaturalist service, the ones I have here don't look out of place.)


Moraea villosa A.  This is what I think if as the classic Moraea villosa color scheme:  Violet tepals, a bright blue eye, and a hairy orange center. (The tepals look blue in the photo, but trust me, they're violet).

There's a variant on this one, which I call Moraea villosa A+.  Although the color scheme is the same, the tepals have more prominent veins, and the eye of the flower has a back ring around it.  It looks very distinctive when seen in person:

Moraea villosa B.  This one has slightly lighter tepals than form A, plus a lemon yellow center instead of orange. One thing I like about this flower is how wide the tepals are. They overlap, making the flower look like one unit. Compare that to form A above, which has gaps between the tepals. The offspring of form B tend to inherit these wide tepals.

I call this one villosa B+. It has a thin dark ring around the eye:

Moraea villosa C.  Light purple with a vivid teal/green eye and orange center, a very nice combination.  The purple in the tepals fades to almost-white after a few days.  All of my Moraeas in the past years had blue eyes, so I was very happy to see this one:

Moraea villosa D.  I think of this as a chocolate Moraea.  In bud, it looks solid brown.  When the flower opens, the tepals are the color of hot chocolate with a bit of whipped cream in it.  In a few days they fade to the color of face powder.  It is the strangest (and ugliest) form of Moraea villosa I've seen.

Here's the same flower a few days later, after the sun has faded it a bit.

Moraea villosa E is pale violet with a big blue-green eye (compare this to form C, which has a greener eye and much bigger orange ring around the eye).

In the right light, you can see that villosa form e has a green ring around the eye. Unfortunately, the same lighting that shows the ring also makes the tepals look white. They're actually pale purplw. (Also note the pollen-loaded honeybee visiting this flower. Bees are attracted to the blue-purple Moraeas. That's why I worry about accidental hybridization in my garden.)

Moraea villosa F.  This one is white.  Not pale purple or violet fading to ivory, just plain white.  The experts in South Africa tell me they haven't seed a white form of M. villosa in the wild, so some people speculate that maybe this is an accidental cross with M. aristata.  I can't rule that out, but the flowers do not show the other characteristics of M. aristata (for example, dots on the backs of the tepals).

I have two clones of this color form, from different sources (note the difference in tepal width).  I crossed them, and they set seed. I'm waiting for it to bloom.

Here's villosa F next to villosa B, for comparison:

Moraea villosa G.  This one looks a lot like form A, so I was not sure whether to give it a separate letter.  But the eye is indigo, almost black, instead of bright blue.  So I decided I should keep it separate:

Moraea villosa H. It's very hard to do this flower justice with a photograph. It's the most intensely colored of all my villosa forms, with dark purple tepals and vivid metallic green eyes. Unfortunately, any photo that captures the color of the tepals makes the eye look dull, while a photo that captures the color of the eye makes the tepals look washed out. So I'll give you four photos, and you'll have to average them in your head.

This plant came to me in a batch of mixed Moraeas labeled as a variety called 'Champagne Ice.' At the same time, I also received it from grower Bob Werra. So it's been around for a while. I have no idea what Champagne Ice is supposed to look like, and I doubt this is it. But who cares, it's a striking flower.

The photo below, courtesy of Garry Knipe, shows the intense color of the eyes. They look almost like something you'd see on a butterfly wing.

Moraea villosa I.  This one's similar to villosa e, but with a lemon yellow center.

Moraea villosa J. The basic color scheme is similar to villosa A, but with an intense orange rim around the eye.

Moraea villosa K. The tepals are pale pink, but unfortunately they fade to off-white after a day in the sun.

Moraea villosa L. The color scheme is a lot like villosa form a, but look at the intensely dark rim around the eye. It makes the eye look all the brighter.

Moraea villosa M. I like the faint purple ring around the eye. It'd be great if I could get that color stronger through breeding.

Moraea villosa N. These pictures look overexposed, but actually that's just the color of the flower. It has a mysterious light-colored eye that looks either greenish or bluish in photos, but is kind of gray in person. It's not necessarily the most beautiful color combination, but I think it's very interesting.

Moraea villosa O. Moraea villosa is a very diverse species, but this form takes the cake. The eye is a strip rather than a half-circle, the central cup is pale cream instead of orange or yellow, there's no outer ring of color around the eye, and there is a touch of magenta on the style crests, which are usually white.

This form was found by Chris and Gerhard Malan north of Piketberg, South Africa, at an altitude between 200 and 600m. They report that it grows in sandy soil mixed with gravel. Different individuals vary subtly in brightness of the colors.

There are three color variants here. Look closely at the tepal colors, style crests, and eye colors.

Photo by Garry Knipe:

Moraea villosa P. This one showed up in a pot of mixed villosas. It's similar to villosa d, but the color is lighter.

Moraea villosa Q. It looks a lot like form H, but the tepals are a little lighter, and there's a strong orangey ring around the eye.

Moraea villosa GS 2894. A villosa selection sold by Gordon Summerfield.