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Hail to the Queen of the Abyss
Ray Rogers on his Flower Show-winning plant, Sinningia leucotricha
Early on the second Saturday morning of a recent Philadelphia Flower Show, I was taking my turn to maintain the Atlock Farm Group’s Container Display entry. As I rounded the corner of the Container Display area, a silver trophy caught my eye....
 The trophy sat beguilingly among the flowering succulents in Class 4210, staged on the opposite side of the aisle. I was still savoring the blue ribbon won by my Sinningia leucotricha in that class the day before, but it took a little while for my morning-fogged brain to process why that trophy was placed there. Then it hit me: maybe my Sinningia had won something else! But what? Surely not the long-coveted Far Out Cactus award. I was certain it had been presented the previous day. Excitedly dropping my (fortunately empty) watering can mid-aisle, I went over for a closer look. Only then did I realize that the judges had in fact awarded the Far Out prize to my Sinningia.
The Queen of the Abyss, or the Brazilian edelweiss, as Sinningia leucotricha is sometimes evocatively called, had tempted me years before, when I grew African violets and other members of their botanical family, the Gesneriaceae. Along with the indoor light stand and fast-draining potting mixes, I bought a copy of The Miracle Houseplants by Virginie F. and George A. Elbert (Crown Publishers, 1984), the gesneriad “bible.” In their discussion of Sininngia canescens (the previously accepted name for S. leucotricha), the authors liken the combination of the silver of the “rabbit fur” leaves and the coral of the flowers to Rococo interior decoration and the works of Fragonard. Unable to resist the appeal of that colorful word picture, I tracked down a nice specimen. As the tuber awoke from dormancy to put forth its leaves (more chinchilla than mere rabbit) and lipstick-colored tubular flowers, I understood completely how the Elberts could write such florid prose.
 My introduction to Sinningia leucotricha coincided with my first stirrings of Flower Show fever late in the 1980s. It didn’t take much of a leap of my imagination to picture this seductress capturing the attention of Show judges. However, it would take another few years before that would become a reality: my first leucotricha perished along with the rest of its kin when I left the country on business for a few weeks in February of 1992. Having set my apartment’s thermostat to an energy-sensible 50 or so degrees, upon my return I discovered virtually all of my heat-loving gesneriads had perished or were barely clinging to life. Assuming the leucotricha was at death’s door, I tossed it out with the other casualties.
A few years later found me deep into competing at the Show, and again I
heard the Sinningia’s siren song. With
the resources of several greenhouses at Atlock Farm now available to me, my second-generation leucotricha fared much better than its ill-fated predecessor, winning blue ribbons at the Show. But over several years it grew large and fat, and in late winter of 2001, it sputtered
and died, as older tubers of the species sometimes do. Having experienced the thrill of success, I vowed for bigger and better exploits with a third generation, so I acquired six tubers of various sizes from four suppliers.
Bingo! In both 2003 and 2004, the biggest of the six plants won a special rosette prize from the judges of the Philadelphia Cactus & Succulent Society, who embrace Sinningia leucotricha as one of their own, along with cacti and other more conventional succulents. The exhilaration continued in 2005, when the same big plant won its third rosette on the last day of horticultural competition. A smaller specimen with three big leaf clusters and particularly showy flowers won the blue in a separate class. That win also thrilled me, particularly because that plant had come into bloom unusually quickly, well before the Show opened.
Fortunately, I had discovered a few years earlier that, if kept on the dry side in a 50-degree greenhouse, an actively growing leucotricha won’t die like my first specimen did. Instead, it nearly shuts down, greatly prolonging the flower display. The smaller specimen remained in tantalizingly good condition throughout a couple of weeks of holding it back, so I decided it was worth entering on Friday.
The rest of the story, as related at the beginning of this tale, is Far Out.
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In addition to being a long-time exhibitor at the Philadelphia Flower Show, Ray Rogers is also the author of the forthcoming book, Coleus (Timber Press). |
