Give a person a plant and they'll have a plant. Teach a person to grow a plant and they'll have an obsessive hobby that uses up their free time, backyard, and spare cash.
Don't say I didn't warn you.
Moraea hybrid MM 10-02c
This blog is about my favorite plants and how I grow them. My garden is a steep south-facing hillside at the southern edge of San Jose, California, about an acre in total. The soil here is heavy clay mixed with rocks, the water city-supplied and expensive.
My main focus in this blog is on unusual bulbs that can be grown in California.
Moraea hybrid MM 10-16d
These are not the bulbs you find in garden centers; they're amazingly colorful, sometimes weird looking, and almost always surprising.
You can grow these bulbs easily in any part of the world that has a Mediterranean climate, and with some care in just about anyplace else as well.
In addition to collecting species bulbs, I do some amateur hybridizing. My main focus is on
Moraea, the "peacock flower" of South Africa. I also play around with
Calochortus (the "butterfly flower" of western North America) and
Gladiolus (tough but delicate trumpet-shaped flowers that are utterly different from the vegetable poodles they sell at Home Depot).
Gladiolus hybrid MM 00-00a
If you'd like to learn more, the sidebar at right lists my most popular posts and some other useful links. (If you're reading this on a smartphone, you probably can't see the sidebar, so I've reproduced the list at the end of this article.)
A color form of Calochortus superbus
I'd love to hear from you. Please feel free to post questions and suggestions. If you're just getting started, I'm glad to give advice. If you know about hybridizing, I need your advice!
I am also very interested in trading with anyone who has unusual
Moraea species. My wish list is
here.
Moraea neopavonia 'Summerfield'
I'm glad to share seeds of species and hybrid plants from my collection, free of charge. Other growers have been very generous with me, and I'd like to give back. Let me know if you want some.
Moraea hybrid MM 12-139b
I would be glad to hear from you:
That's a C between my first and last names. Yeah, I know, the spam-bots can probably read that. But why make their job easy?
Here's the list of my favorite posts:
New Moraea hybrids, 2024New Moraea hybrids, 2022New Moraea hybrids, 2021My Moraea species wish list (can you help?)
Finally, I'd like to say thanks to the many gardeners in the Pacific Bulb Society, the Indigenous Bulb Growers of South Africa, and the old International Bulb Society who have shared advice, encouragement, and plants with me over the years. In particular, Paul F.X. von Stein, who shared many seeds to get me started; and Moraea king Bob Werra, who gave me many of the bulbs that were parents to these hybrids.
