Sinningia douglasii

1. Blooming
2. Feature table
3. In Habitat
4. My history with this species
5. Hybridization
6. External link
7. Publication and etymology

An epiphytic and "roof-o-phytic" sinningia.

Click here for a picture of the entire plant.

Blooming

Blooming season, in spring, is short but intense.  A mature tuber can produce a hundred or more flowers.  They open over a relatively short period, so before you know it, the blooming period is done.

Our local hummingbird, Calypte anna, often visits S. douglasii when it blooms here in May.

In Habitat

S. douglasii is epiphytic.  This terrible picture, from the 1999 expedition of the Gesneriad Research Foundation (GRF), attempts to capture S. douglasii growing on a tree branch.  Below it, projecting to the left, is a bromeliad, and the red smudge to the right of the S. douglasii stem is an out-of-focus flower of Nematanthus tessmannii.  The poor quality of this photograph is a result both of my inexperience and the difficulty of taking a picture up into a brightly lit sky.  Even so, the characteristic whorl-of-six leaf pattern and the distinctive red midribs and leaf veins can clearly be seen.  This was in April, Brazil autumn, so that Sinningia douglasii's flowering was long past, and the leaves were starting to turn yellow in preparation for dropping.

We also saw S. douglasii growing in the furrows of tiled roofs, where enough plant debris had accumulated to support opportunistic vegetation.

My history with this species

In the early eighties, I sowed seed of "Sinningia verticillata" and got one good plant.  It took about six or seven years, but it eventually rewarded my patience with flowers, in 1989.  Around Christmas 1990, while I was visiting family in Seattle, and therefore unable to protect my plants, we had a spell of unanticipated cold weather, with daytime temperatures around freezing, which is very unusual for the San Francisco Bay Area (it has not happened since then).  I returned to find many plants dead or severely damaged.  The top of the "S. verticillata" tuber rotted.  The bottom remained alive and firm for about three years, but never sprouted.

In 1993, I got more seed from the AGGS Seed Fund.  My best plant of this species originated from that sowing, and has provided a lot of seed back to the Fund over the years.

Hybridization

I believe that S. douglasii has been crossed with many of the other members of the Dircaea clade.  Given the results of other intra-Dircaea hybrids, all such crosses are likely to be fertile.

I crossed Sinningia douglasii with S. leucotricha, and got flowers in May 2007 (click here for pictures).  A cross of S. douglasii with S. 'Distant Lights' (S. leopoldii x sp. "Black Hill") has bloomed.

In general, crosses with S. douglasii have been disappointing.  Both the leucotricha cross and that with 'Distant Lights' have (so far) borne very few flowers, even though S. douglasii itself is a heavy bloomer.  S. douglasii hybrids must be very rare in cultivation, since I have not heard of any others (by contrast with, for instance, S. eumorpha, S. conspicua, S. cardinalis, S. reitzii, and S. leucotricha, which have been used in a lot of crosses).  Although the related S. piresiana is not as impressive a plant as S. douglasii, its hybrids are usually good plants with abundant bloom.

Feature table for Sinningia douglasii

External Link

See the picture of a flowering plant on Ron Myhr's Gesneriad Reference Web.

Publication

Sinningia douglasii used to be known as S. verticillata, in acknowledgment of the "verticillate" (see etymology) growth habit, meaning having leaves in whorls.  A mature plant of this species normally has its leaves in two whorls of three, but the whorls are so close together that they appear to be a single whorl of six.

Unfortunately, a prior publication under the name Gesneria douglasii was discovered, which, by the sometimes tyrannical laws of botanical nomenclature, meant that a pleasant name had to be scrapped in favor of a grating one.  As can be seen at the bottom of this page, neither the original publication nor the first verticillata reference were under the name Sinningia.  Makes no difference -- the rules were made to ensure objective application, but not to ensure that the names made sense or that the best name prevailed.

By happy coincidence, however, new collections were made of this species just about the time of the name change.  S. verticillata was notorious for taking six-seven years to bloom from seed, but the plants collected in the late 80s and early 90s were much faster to flower.

The Smithsonian website gives a long list of published synonyms for S. douglasii.  If I understand the listing correctly, the crucial ones were

• Gesneria douglasii (1827), by Lindley
• Orobanche verticillata (1829)
• Gesneria douglasii var. verticillata (1837)
• Rechsteineria douglasii (1891)
• Rechsteineria verticillata (1939)
• Sinningia verticillata (1973)
• Sinningia douglasii (1990), by Chautems.