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Thursday, March 8, 2012

Moraea Tricolor?

The second and third flowers below came to me as Moraea tricolor.  The flowers are certainly the right shape, and the foliage matches as well.  But the color scheme is very different from the usual M. tricolor you see online.  Goldblatt's book says they're variable, so maybe these are just unusual (and pretty) color forms.

But I also wonder if they're possibly hybrids.  I self-pollinated them to see if they'll breed true, but in the meantime, what do you think?

This is the form of M. tricolor that you usually see in cultivation.  It's lustworthy, even though the flowers are small (maybe an inch across) and last only a single day.


Here's the "Moraea tricolor" that bloomed this week.  The inner tepals are purple, the outer ones are white with a bit of purple veining in them.  If this is part of the species, it's a lot more variable than I realized.


This is another flower from the same pot.  It looks like a pale form of the typical M. tricolor, but if you look closely you'll see the inner tepals are a bit darker than the outer ones. So I wonder about this one too...

Edit:  Maybe I was wrong.  I just found a M. tricolor photo on a Japanese grower's weblog that looks a lot like these.  A link to the photo is here, and you can see an English translation of the weblog here. Saboteru, whoever you are, you grow beautiful plants.

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