Robusta, my favourite autumn flower
By Carrie Krüger, Utopia Clivias,
Autumn has always been my favourite month of the year. The colour changes of leaves, the fresh autumn breeze and the new burst of energy that we discover after the long hot months of summer.
And of course… the flowering of my large variety of robusta plants.
My robusta collection started with a batch of plants bought from a local wholesale nursery in 2004, whom had it marked as clivia nobilis(?). These were bought for a landscaping project I was working on at that time. Upon arrival I could immediately see that they were indeed not nobilis, but another species, simply by the shape of the leaves and size of the plants. They were almost all in bud at that time. I decided to wait for them to flower before I planted them.
When they started flowering, I decided to do some research into their background and found out from one of the owners of the nursery, that they were collected as seeds from a habitat in Natal. They were all robustas and some better and more beautiful than others. I selected and marked all the plants with unusual colours, bigger flowers and large umbels to breed with and used the rest in the landscaping project.
These handpicked plants were pollinated between one another and flowered about four years later. Once again, the best flowers were selected and kept aside; some with very pretty and unusual colours. Bigger flowers were produced in this first generation by simply crossing them to each other. These are now all named and numbered and used in my breeding programme. I have been experimenting with special coloured miniata flowers as pollen parents and vice versa. Some of these crosses should flower in the next season or two. I have seen that the flowers in the first generation of Robusta crosses are much bigger than F1 flowers of Gardenii crosses. My aim is to not only get bigger flowered interspecifics, but to also improve on colours and patterns. This may take a few years, but patience is something all keen clivia breeders should have.
Robustas are not only beautiful plants with a wide variety of colours in autumn, but also very good breeding plants to use for breeding good interspecific plants with a high floret count and a wide variety of colours and leaf shapes.
