These pictures are for Joey :-)))

Rosario is very curvy this year and her child is doing her first steps in dancing... Majestic Yungacense x Papilio is still overlooking the scene.

Oooh Anja, she's beautiful!!! This picture is a close-up which shows off her curves to advantage! Congratulations!!

Rosario is a proud mom too I'll bet! I'm hoping mine will bloom this spring also!

Oh, oh, oh!!!! In my opinion, she is perfect! Rosario is a pink beauty, but this is a debutante! I love her!!! This is one that should be mass produced and sold. If the bulb companies offered her, I would buy her. You have had a knockout year for your maiden blooms!

Hello everyone!

What beauty! I just can't believe I missed that much! Anja congratulations on a wonderful seedling!

Beatrice your La Orotava is very interesting!

That's a good name for her Anja, Debutante!!!!

Donna, you're so right, thank you!!! I was looking for a name and even asked Joey but this is it! I just have to give her the German name "Die Debütantin" because I love the letter "ü" so much :-)))

Hmmm... my curiosity compels me to throw out the idea of Rosario x Abendhimmel ..... you could start the Debütantin family

Yes Joey, I had the same thought :-) I already put some of Abendhimmels little orange sisters pollen on one Rosario flower because I thought of something orange with star and curves... Abendhimmel is in the queue too. I have 8 flowers to play with, that gives me some possibilities.

I looked at my last seasons seedlings and found two very small ones of Rosario x Mocca and some Rosario x Amputo that look much bigger.

Now for something completely different:

Sonatini #163 is as cute as last season :-)

Oh Anja, just as beautiful if not more than last year!!!!

Anja, she is gorgeous!!! Such different colors to play with!

Anja , I love it so much that I ordered it twice after seeing your photos :-)

Anja! Your sonatini # 163 is beautiful! Fluffy beauty!))

#163 is one of my favorites also from 2017 sonatini batch. So cute and pretty!

I have some green flowers reblooming together:

Mocca, Green Valley (with only a few red markings) and Magic Green.

Great Show! These three fit / match very well together. Did you ever observe some partly double bloom on "Magic Green"?

No, no signs of double blooms at all and I have this bulb the third year now. One of the flowers has deformed petals but this is the only thing to criticise on that beauty.

Anja,

What a beautiful display :-)))

Anja, you're having a really good year for beautiful flowers over there this year!! It must be something in the European air!! Your boyfriend must think he's living in a greenhouse!! ;-))

Donna

Anja, these three are just gorgeous!! Green Valley is so - well green!!! And has a wonderful shape. A beautiful portrait of three beautiful flowers. Jody

Anja, you get the Sonatinis incredibly well! They are magnificent. Do you take them outside in the summer so that they can regain strength as well?

Béatrice, not all of the Sonatinis are growing that well. I think I kept #163 inside and #1623 went outside. The Ratatouille bulbs I planted in the garden last year. I only took the biggest out in fall, I'm curious whether the others survived the winter.

I think almost all my Hippis love the fact that our flat is quite cool during winter. The windows are east and west facing, so IF there is sun in winter they get some too.

I went to some real tropical and subtropical greenhouses last weekend and saw a beautiful display of clivias.

Haweha was asking for partly double blooms on Magic Green. I've never had that before but when the last flower of Magic Green opened I found that the parts of the stigma transformed into a petal:

Very well observed, Anja, and my own Observation was that, on the umbel of 4 flowers, only the two younger florets were affected. Thank you for your documentation. I regret that I did not take a Picture,THEN. On the other hand, someone else HAD documented this, yes, on GardenWeb - and only the two younger florets, the "two last" that is, were affected.

I had heard that Magic Green sometimes had messy flowers. Even so, I actually don't mind this example at all.

I agree. I do not mind a messy flower either - WELL: Every now-and-then. Such phaenomena simply enhance my interest in the "crop".

What do we know of Magic Green? My first inclination is that it would be beautifully paired with papilio or papilio crosses. I don't see those seeds available, so it tells me that there is some difficulty getting seeds from a Magic Green crossing... or that some other reason is making crossings using Magic Green unattractive? Is the messy throat responsible for its lack of use?

Fred, if you've got any papilio pollen, you should put some back on this flower. For some reason, it appears that papilio's genes remain mostly dormant in the first crossing looking back at other pictures as well as yours. How many flowers?

I actually made the same cross a few years ago and it didn't take!!

Your second flower has gorgeous color, when it opens, will it look like a fushia?

Hi Donna,

I think I do have some papilio pollen and I'll take your advise and hope for the best. I haven't been lucky with any pollination attempts lately :-((( As for the second flower, it remains in tubular form but the color does intensify somewhat.

This is really interesting Fred, that the flower of your Santos x Papilio has almost no stripes and rather round petals! Is this a maiden bloom? I cross my fingers for pollination with Papilio pollen!!!

Joey, I did use Magic Greens pollen and got many seeds. I think I have some seedlings with a pink No-ID from 2016 and some with Mocca from last season. I actually don't know why I did not use it more for crossing, I like it very much. I don't remember if I ever tried to obtain seeds using it as the mother plant.

Hi Anja,

This is her maiden bloom, so perhaps it may look different next year? I will take Donna's advise and pollinate one bloom with papilio pollen and dust the other bloom with some older Santos pollen. I hope something works :-)))

Here are my current blooms. The second scape of Mocca with five flowers, lovely Jewel and Amore, which has really big flowers.

A blackbird decided to build her home in our blackberries:-))) Spring is finally there!

Anja, gorgeous, Jewel is one of my all time favorites, so elegant and her scent is heavenly! Unfortunately, the subtle colors of Mocca are hard to photograph. I'm glad I listened to our forum friends and ordered one or I would have missed out on her unusual beauty. Your Amore shouts Spring! As does you blackbird nesting close to a food source and thorny protection :))

Jody

I have considered Mocca for a few years and always talk myself out of the purchase. A mistake for sure. When I see photos like this, they capture the beauty so much more than the advertising photos. I think Mocca has such a refined and regal shape. I like it very much. Mocca x Debutantin? Mocca x papilio? I really like Amore too. Does your Jewel give mostly single flowers? Wouldn't it be nice to get some scent into all our lovely singles? Happy Spring!

Well, I trusted Donnas pictures of Mocca and don't see any reason to regret it :-) It is really difficult to photograph but it is easy to grow! I think I have pods x Giraffe, x#1820 and #Exotica (transatlantic pollinations :-)) that look promising and one pod I forget to name. I'm quite sure that I put Chico pollen on that flower. I will try Papilio on one flower for sure and maybe Rosario. Last year I harvested x Daphne, x Pyjama Party and x Magic Green.

Talking of Debütantin: The second seedling of this cross is flowering now: It is really a little sister - similar color and markings but smaller flowers and not as curvy as Debütantin. I like it. Colors are more vibrant than the picture shows.

Jody, I love Jewel too, mainly because of its elegance. I won't breed with it though because I prefer single flowers and I don't have the room to grow them all...

Hi Anja,

What a beautifully delicate bloom with the contrasting markings in her throat. Congratulations, she really is quite stunning :-)))

It is really beautiful, Anja. A good idea turned out with beautiful results! Isn't it a shame we run out of space so often. If only we had acres and acres of suitable land and an agreeable environment, just think what would be the results of crosses made after careful consideration and even the random crosses we make based only upon what pollen and what flowers we have at any given moment.

I stand in solidarity with Fred! Anja, congratulations! Beautiful and delicate flower!

Thank you friends :-)

I agree with you, Joey! But it is not only space, it is also time I would need more...

Here are two Exotica x self flowering in the same pot. I still miss their mother...

Ok friends, I have some flowers to add:

Lovely SpotlightEmanuelle taking some sunCaramba!
The kitchen crewGood old Ambiance is very colorful and curvy this year!Pyjama Party has only one scape this year but with six perfect flowers!Daphne with a very tiny Tosca (in the bottom). Daphne is hard to photograph but very impressive in person. It reminds me of a big old velvet sofa. Two scapes with four flowers look kind of luxurious. I was thinking of cutting one to give the flowers more room but I like it too much like this. Hungry blackbird babies :-)

Hi Anja,

They're all very beautiful and I especially love your Emanuelle and Ambiance, they're colors are beautifully intense :-))) As for the blackbird babies...they're precious and growing very quickly, keep us posted on their progress :-)))

Anja, they are all so beautiful!! I wondered if Pajama Party was similar to Gervase- what do you think? - Jody

Anja all very beautiful!! What a display you must have in your apartment!! Your Ambiance and Pajama Party are gorgeous as is your Carramba but I have difficulty getting Pajama Party to grow on after its initial blooming. This is the third year that I've bought a new one and this one is rotting too. Oh well, I can always buy another next season!

I know how much fun you're having watching your baby birds, I hope you get to see when they fly out of the nest, it's usually very early in the morning, around dawn. We have birdhouses all over the place and the babies can fly out at any time of the day from the houses and there is always one poor baby that remain that didn't get enough food and the poor parents have to fly all over the yard to keep that babies fed as well as those that are flying all over the place!! I'm always relieved when the last baby exits the birdhouse!

Jody, I'm quite sure that Pyjama Party is not similar to Gervase. Gervase has bigger blooms and they are more curvy and I have never seen more than four flowers per scape while Pyjama Party has five to six blooms per scape. My Gervase has a bud too so we can compare soon.

Donna, I hope this too but it is not very likely because we can only go to our garden on the weekends. We have birdhouses too but it is really so much fun to watch them in the open nest. I just hope that they all survive! By the way I love your picture of the wild turkey!

How do you keep your cats from eating the baby birds?

I'm happy that Pyjama Party rebloomed for me because I did not see it offered again this season! The funny thing is that all these bulbs stayed on my kitchen window the whole year and they all flowered at the same time and a little later than most of my other bulbs. I still have some flowers to come but the season draws to a close soon...

Anja, Our cats never ever go outside!! We have coyotes in our town and nobody lets their cats out!! No small dogs either in fact we have a very strict leash law. Gone are the days when you can have cats and let them out the way we always did when I was growing up. It's been years since I've seen a cat in anyone's yard other than in a window and we live in a fairly thickly settled neighborhood. In neighboring towns, people do let their cats out but we have so much undeveloped woodland in our town and about 15+ acres abuts one side of our backyard. That's why we have so many deer raccoons and turkeys!!

A few years ago a deer got hit by a car down on the road beneath us and our neighbor called us to let us know that it had run on our property and died. The next morning my husband went looking to remove it and all that was left were a few bones and a bits of the carcass. The coyotes had feasted during the night and eaten the entire thing!!

me too, I'm crazy pictures of Donna's wild turkeys, we never see anything like this here!

They seem unreal to me.

and the coyotes, have you ever taken pictures Donna?

Anja, I'm coming too late, but I really enjoyed watching your last blooms, especially Pyjma Party that I really like, one of my favorites

Some more blooms for you: I'm especially enjoying the fragrant trumpets:

Rebecca is the one with the strongest and sweetest scentSantiago. The motherbulb reblooming with three flowers and an offset with two. For me the scent is very fruity and I like it.
Amputo together with Gervase that has only three flowers this year. Can you see the differences to Pyjama Party, Jody?
Amputo is incredibly beautiful but hard to photograph. I heard that it could be difficult to rebloom but I cannot say this for my bulb. Maybe they found a clone that is easier to grow.

I will try to cross all those trumpets (plus Estella that is in bud too). Maybe I can create another fragrant beauty...

Amarilis second year with 6 flowers

God, how beautiful Debutante is! And ;);)the name could not be better, Joey

Now I understood I could spend some valuable time, here on House

Anja & Vlad,

Thank you for posting your beautiful blooms, they're really helping to brighten my day.