Moraea macronyx

This very cheerful flower blooms in early spring, before most of my other Moraeas. The plants wait for a sunny day and then bloom all at once. Although each flower lasts for only a day, they're a very pleasant sight. The blooming period lasts for several weeks.

The typical M. macronyx looks like this:

Here's one with more yellow in the outer tepals:

This one has almost no dark markings on the tepals:

Moraea ciliata

I was introduced to this species by Bob Werra, the dean of US Moraea growers. It's usually a small plant, and the flowers last only a day each, but they bloom for several weeks in early spring when few other plants are flowering, and their intricate details reward close examination.

The flowers are usually in shades of blue or white, with dark markings on the backs of the tepals. There is a brown form in cultivation, introduced by bulbophile.com (they now sell it as Moraea sp., so maybe the identification is unsure). Some of the plants have extravagantly-undulating leaves. Bob calls these the "crinkle" forms, and they're a remarkable sight.

If you grow these plants, be warned that the snails and slugs in California love to chew on them. I've had the middles of the plants eaten out by those beasts. It doesn't kill the bulbs, but it ruins the year's flowers.

Here's the typical pale blue form. You can see a crinkled leaf in the background (lower left).

These two forms don't have crinkled leaves, but one has a yellow eye and the other is orange. I've labeled the yellow one form A and the orange one form B:

Here's a white one with excellent crinkling:

Another white, with few crinkles:

Here you can see the brown color on the backs of the tepals:

Bob shared with me a blue form that's a bit taller than the typical ones, and that has hypnotic smoky blue flowers. I've found it to be harder to bloom than the others, but the corms persist. I hope eventually I'll be able to make it happy, because these are very beautiful flowers.

In the years since I wrote that, the flowers have indeed become happier. I now have a nice big cluster of them in a raised bed, raised from seedlings of the gray-blue ones. The flowers vary from light purple to sky blue to that eerie blue-gray color. They offset profusely, so let me know if you want some...

Wonderful sky blue:

Here's the brown one: