Crocosmia: have you ever wondered....

... what would happen if you were to separate that long string of corms?

Ok, backtrack: Crocosmia (formerly and sometimes still known as Montbretia) are a popular garden plant: they have long, upright, narrow leaves, topped with an arching spire of flowers.

 

They come in shades of yellow and orange, and are usually about knee height: and then there is the cultivar Lucifer - left - which is bright red, and waist height.

It's very popular, and deservedly so: the flowers are magnificent, the plants are super-easy to grow, they are as tough as old boots, they survive in horrible soil, they seem to thrive on neglect, and all you have to do is cut down the foliage in winter, once it's gone brown and droops sadly: then the following spring, up they come again, and by mid-summer they are blooming their socks off.

Left to their own devices, they will spread to form large clumps, which sometimes gives them a bit of a reputation for being a thug, but I don't go along with that: if you don't want them, they are very easy to remove, as they are not deep-rooted.

Because they come up smiling ever year, they are a perennial: and they are usually described as a  bulbous perennial, although technically, they grow from a Corm, not a Bulb (what's the difference? I could tell you, but it's not really important) (oh all right, I'll cover it in detail, next time!)

If you've ever dug them up, you'll know that these corms form a chain underneath the plant:

...you can see that there is a succession of flattened corms here, stacked on top of each other, with the current year's flowering shoot (now dead) just visible at the top.

Every student, every Trainee I have ever had, plus a whole lot of people who ask me questions here, have asked at some point, "Is it possible to split up these chains of corms? Will we get lots more plants, if we do?"

As you will have gathered by now, if you are a regular reader, I love to do experiments, and I hate to take other people's word for things: especially if the "other people" in question are the internet.

Pardon the grammar of that sentence!

Anyway, so there's the question - what would happen if we were to separate the chain of corms, and plant them all out individually?

Last July, my Trainee and I were lifting, splitting and moving huge clumps of Lucifer, so we decided to try an experiment for ourselves. 

 We started with a healthy-looking string or chain of corms.

The oldest is on the left, the youngest one is on the right.

As we did this in summer, right in the middle of their flowering season, we had no idea if this would work, as an experiment, or not: it probably would have been better to do it either in autumn, as everything was dying down: or, possibly, better, in early spring, to give them all a good start.

However, it was July, and we had the time, so we took this section of corms, which didn't have any greenery growing from it, and decided to give it a go.

Next, we carefully split up the chain.

Again, oldest on the left, youngest on the right, and this gave us six corms, of very different sizes.

Presumably the bigger ones were formed during "good" years?

We deliberately didn't cut the chain, we snapped them - gently, carefully - because corms have a basal plate, and if we were to damage it by cutting into it, well, it would spoil our experiment.

 

Now we potted each corm up separately, and in this photo we started with the oldest one in the top left, then going from left to right, then to the bottom row, left to right. 

So the youngest corm - the whitest one - is on the bottom row, far right, with a white label.

We then filled the pots with compost, watered well, and stood them to one side, to see what would happen.

For a long time, nothing happened....

Then, in December, I noticed that two of the corms had put out foliage! This was very surprising, not least because we planted them in July, at the point where they "should" have been in full flower. 

Normally, plants with underground storage organs like these, rely on what happened the previous year to be the fuel for any flowers appearing this year.

So I would not have expected those corms to do anything at all.

As  you might be able to see, only two of them made an effort: corms 2 and 3, with 1 being the oldest, and 6 being the youngest.

So 2 and 3 sent up leaves, and in due course, they died off and I removed them.

Over the winter, I kept the pots outdoors, exposed to all the usual weather, and I watered them maybe a couple of times, just to keep the compost damp.

This photo - left - was taken yesterday (we are now in late April) and you can see that all six of them are sprouting.

Which is quite exciting, and rather interesting: when left in the ground, only the top one shoots, and I know this because of the number of times I have uplifted and moved them - never once have I seen any greenery sprouting from any corm other than the top, youngest one.

So there is your answer: if you split up the chains, you will get a lot of plants.

But!

And it's a big but.... internet research suggests that only the newest one will flower. None of the others will flower, because each corm is "used up" in producing the flower, and the new corm, for the following year.

 Shame!!

Mind you, bearing in mind what I said at the beginning of this article, I am going to let these six plants grow on, and just see how many of them produce any sort of flowers.

I will let  you know.......

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