Looking good ...

Wow ... Festival On Ice is gorgeous.

Your violets are so healthy.

'Festival' is suppose to be a more fantasy bloom. Swirls and spots. I think. BUT i like this 'fantasy' as it is. It is much larger than its first and only bloom way back in Sept? It was a sad tiny limp thing. And the bloom was just as sad. I didnt even know it was a variegated plant. It has a nice white variegation on it.

You opened the box - and this poor plantlet on its almost last breath whispered - I AM IN GOOD HANDS. I WILL LIVE!!!!!

Wow, your Snow Edelweiss looks so different from mine. Same shape and colors but so pink, with little blue/purple and no white. Your temps are probably a lot warmer than mine.

mine is inside in A/C, if you have pics. of yours i like to ethem. I thought it has more white to. Thats why i bought it. But it looks so much like Playful Spectrum, i love it. Playful spectrum dies on me so fast! This one is huge and healthy.

What a treat. Thanks for sharing.

Now that first summer I had it in 2016 my temps in Georgia got pretty warm, up into the 80's, and it was a struggle to keep my Russians and Streps happy. Snow Edelweiss did just fine and kept on blooming but I lost the white in the blooms during that period. It came back later in the autumn/winter bloom cycles when cooler. So this is a typical seasonal pattern I see with this plant every year.

Also, this one /can/ be a dropped for me if my humidity is low. Usually though my humidity is fairly high and the flowers last a long time. It makes a nice contrast to my Amour Elite which is way more pink and has very little purple fantasy. Maybe I can dig up a photo of it for comparison. It just bloomed it's brains out for me last month.

This one tends more to semi-double in cool temps, more singles in warm. Flowers on my Amour Elite are also typically about half the size of the flowers on my Snow Edelweiss.

A more extreme example of a typical Russian/Ukrainian for me are the thumb print patterned flowers. My VAT Utro is snow white in winter and only shows the purple and pink fantasy in the warmer summer months. Below is the typical cycle of my thumb print Russians like LE Karusel, Frosty Cherry, EK Before the Storm, and this one is RS Rosinka - as seen in spring and autumn for me:

But in winter it flowers like this for me, more fully double as well. BIG flowers.

However, in high summer I tend to get flowers on that plant that look like this:

Would you ever guess this is the /same/ plant??? Yet it does this fairly reliably. This past summer though I had lost my adult plant during my moving fiasco and only now have maturing babies so I missed out seeing blooms for a while.

Also note that these are 'star' peloric blooms - symmetrical rather than the more typical 'African Violet' shape. I'm working on breeding streptocarpus like this though Pavel Enikeev in the Ukraine (Dimitris of DS hydbrid fame) has already been producing 'star' peloric formed streps for the past couple of years.

Poohbearlvr, just like with variegated plants that are too warm and loosing their variegation (or conversely have too much white and need to be grown warmer) you can move your Snow Edelweiss to a cooler area or a lower shelf and see if that doesn't help bring the white out more in the upper petals.

Your 'Snow Edelweiss' is the way I thought mine would look. But mine looks great. So i am happy. My 'Playful Spectrums' are all gone, I gave up on them, So this one is pretty close to it , and it seems to be happy and easy to grow, so...i have a 'look alike' to the Playful Spectrum, and yet I have a different one. This one seems to be easy to get blooms. Yours looks a lot like mine in your second set of pics. When it is warmer in Ga.? Those pics. They look a lot like mine. Like I said. Mine are all inside, in A/C it is like 78-80 during the day and maybe 76 at night if that.

Yep, that's why yours have no white and are so pink. If you ever find a location you can grow them in the 60's to low 70's you'll get the more typical look. I'm glad to hear your warmer temperatures haven't killed it - a lot of Russians just can't endure the higher temps and slowly die off.

My EK Scarabe hasn't bloomed and barely lingered for years - until I moved back up into the mountains. And now it's happy again! It's about to bloom for the first time in ages and I'm really looking forward to seeing it.

It is an older Russian hybrid. There are admittedly a lot better Russians out there. I don't think it being fantasy has anything to do with it - lots of fantasy bloomers out there that are a lot less troublesome. But I completely agree with you that EK Scarabe is a pain in the butt. For me, Feather is another one that's been difficult but is suddenly doing much better in the cooler temperatures. In the long run I probably won't keep either of these but now Scarabe is about to open flowers? I may as well hang onto it long enough to enjoy them. To be fair there was a lot of AV's and Streps that didn't like the heat of Athens, Georgia that may do a lot better now we are back in the mountains.

On the flip side my tropical hibiscus and adeniums are very unhappy up here.

SO lovely! Love all the ruffles!