Here are my favorite new Moraea hybrids from 2024. My apologies that this is late; it was a busy year.
Beautiful colors
MM 20-178. This streaky purple flower looks to me like something I’d see on a tuberous ginger plant rather than a Moraea. Sadly, it produces almost no pollen, and didn’t set seeds when I crossed something onto it. So it may be a dead end in terms of breeding.
MM 20-117. This beautiful flower looks like a yellow version of M. gigandra. Unfortunately, a couple of days after it opens the color fades to cream-white.
GK 2118_16. I want to show you an excellent flower from the garden of Gary Knipe. Garry is a breeder of Pacific Coast Irises who is also hybridizing Moraeas. He’s been doing a great job of breeding for rich colors. Below is a marvelous example. Click through to see the whole family, which have intense colors and contrasting rings around the eyes.
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Colorful eyes
MM 19-25a, b. Two species, Moraea tricuspidata and M. bellendenii, cause strange multicolored markings in the eyes of hybrids. In this case, we have blue eyes spiked and mottled with yellow, a striking combination.
MM 19-148a. At first glance the flower below doesn’t look all that unusual, but pause for a moment and look closer. Usually the eye is bordered in black or a dark color, but in this case the outer edge is purple. I’m starting to see this in a more hybrids, and I like it a lot.
MM 19-32a. Some Moraea species have yellow eyes, but those eyes are generally small. This hybrid is very unusual because it has large orange-yellow eyes.
GK 1918a. Check out the crazy eye on this one! There’s a narrow white line just inside the outer edge of the eye, as if it had been etched. Moraea grower Garry Knipe grew a flower with this pattern years ago (link), and this is an offspring of that cross. I’m delighted that the etched look has been transmitted to this flower, and I hope to do a lot more breeding with it.
Interesting markings
MM 15-52. If you like spotted flowers (and I do), this is a great one.
MM 20-47. These flowers have a very bold dot pattern around the eye. The flowers are pale orange-yellow when they open, but fade to white.
GK 2131_1. This one is nice looking too:
MM 20-353. Wow, check out the huge forked and speckled inner tepals on these flowers.
GK 2128. This is another nice selection from Garry Knipe. I like the unusual stippled dot pattern in the center of this flower.
Weird M. lurida hybrids
Moraea lurida continues to produce startling flowers when used in hybrids. Here are a couple of examples.
MM 18-178. This is a crazy flower. In person it looks more rust-colored than orange, but I still like the dark eye with yellow markings.
MM 18-186b. Here’s another M. lurida offspring with unusual veins and pastel colors. Not necessarily beautiful, but very striking.
Here’s a species selection that bloomed for me for the first time in 2024. It’s a deep maroon version of M. lurida. I’ve been growing this particular plant for years, but it never bloomed. I burned some dry grass over its spot in the bed while it was dormant last summer, and I think that might have triggered the bloom.
Moraea lurida form b (dark form). I can’t wait to see what sort of hybrids this produces.
Thoughts on 2024
It was a challenging year for my Moraea collection. Last summer my dormant growing beds were attacked by waves of rodents: ground squirrels during the day, voles in the evening, and mice at night. By the time I realized how bad the situation was, several of my older beds looked like they had been ploughed. I tried baiting and traps, but I wasn’t able to get the problem fully under control until I put galvanized hardware cloth onto the tops of every bed.
I lost many mature corms, but the rodents left behind a lot of small offsets. So I’m hopeful that the beds will regenerate in the next couple of years.
Very fortunately, I got the hardware cloth onto my more recent beds before they suffered huge damage. So I can keep on breeding new things with those hybrids.
The lesson: If you grow South African bulbs near the countryside, like I do, you need to armor your pots and beds against rodents. A few South African genera, like Amaryllis, are rodent resistant, but most are eaten like candy.
About my breeding program
I started my bulb collection about 30 years ago, 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 15 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.
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, especially if you have any botanical expertise.
My Moraea wish list
There are about twenty more Moraea species that should be compatible with the ones I’ve been breeding, but they are not available in commerce. I hear they’re privately grown, though. 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 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 return that generosity. If you’re interested, send me a note at the email address here. Include your name, mailing address, whether you want species or hybrids, and how many seeds you'd like. I'll try to send you a mix of the year's most promising hybrids. I send seeds in late autumn to winter 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 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.
Hey, Bob, one of the Moraea algoensis corms you gave me just bloomed for the first time. It's tiny but cute.
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