Pakistan Gardening Forum

I am not sure if you are aware that there are six Clivia species. Here are their names:

1. Miniata. The flowers are open like a dish. Seeds mature in 9 months.
2. Gardenii. The flowers are pendulous. Seeds mature in 18 months.
3. Caulescens. The flowers are pendulous. Seeds mature in 6 months.
4. Robusta. The flowers are pendulous. Seeds mature in 9 months.
5. Nobilis. The flowers are pendulous and carry a high count of flowers. Seeds mature in 9 months.
6. Mirabilis. The flowers are pendulous and the plants are extremely rare and hard to get. Seeds mature in 6 months.

I will add photos of each specie at the end.

All the species of Clivia should flower after 4 or 5 years. It is only Nobilis that take 7 to 12 years to flower because they are very slow growers.

The miniata specie is most popular because of the open flower. They start flowering here now untill October.

Clivia needs to be fertilized to grow well and flower well. I feed seedlings up to 3 years with a fertiliser with a high Nitrogen and Phosphorous every 2 weeks. I use Fertifeed N20:P1:K3 + trace elements. Seedlings over 3 years and mature plants are fed with some Nitrogen and high Potassium for flower forming. Here I use Fertifeed N4:P1:K4 + trace elements every 2 weeks, skip the 3rd week and fertilize with Haifa Multi K N13: P0:K46: because processes already starts around January to build or form the flowers in the plant to flower in August. That is 8 months it takes to form the flowers of a mature plant. If you do not feed them you will either not get it to flower or you will get inferior flowers. A perfect fertilizer is Phostrogen N14:P7:K27 + trace elements.

When there are no flowers the plant's foliage still looks beautiful and the scape with the green pods also make a good display. The pods starts changing to bright colours from about 2 months before maturity and that display is as beautiful as flowers. You see many different shades of orange to red and yellow to peach colours.

I hope with this post I will get a lot of new growers of Clivia in Pakistan. I will write a step by step instruction for germinating the seeds and how to handle the germinated seeds because they are very vulnerable when sowed to about 6 months.

Miniata


Gardenii


Caulescens


Robusta

Nobilis mother and daughter in one pot. The mother gives 50 plus flowers each year


Mirabilis

Very nicely explained..thank you. Miniata is the best- at least for starting, in my view. In fact that was the only one I knew about.
Is any one fragrant? Could you please also show an image with green pods.

Thank you for your golden response, How long it takes from sowing to flower, my gut feeling is, about 3 years.
Arif

Like I wrote above that most of the species take between 4 and 5 years to flower from seed if it is grown well.

The Nobilis takes between 7 to 12 years because they are very slow growers. Mirabilis is very unpredictable.

Strange How I missed your 18th post.
Regards
Arif

Hmmm... very good Clivia

Muhammad Arif Khan wrote:

khabbab wrote:

tweedle2009 wrote:They are ideally suited to Rawalpindi and islamabad.

I had always thought the Rawalpindi climate is very similar to lahore. But Brig Arif also mentioned it somewhere. How does it differ from lahore?

TULIPS are wild in Islamabad and not seen in Lahore.

wild tulips , thats good, it is a news to me