Sinningia amambayensis

1. Feature table
2. Culture
3. Grooming
4. Quantity of bloom
5. The unusual fruit of this species
6. The Mamba Group
7. Hybridization
8. Publication and etymology

Sinningia amambayensis

• is sticky.  The leaves are sticky.  The stems are sticky.  Even the flowers are sticky.
• has cheerful red (or orange-red) tubular flowers, produced over a long blooming season.
• usually trails and flops and crawls.
• has green leaves.  The leaf color in the picture above is approximately correct.  The picture below shows more flowers, but the leaf color is too dark.
• presents unusual grooming problems.
• positions its fruits in an unusual way.

Although this picture shows the same plant as above, the leaves look darker due to not very skillful photoshopping in an attempt to bring out the flowers.

Culture

Culture is easy, except for one peculiarity, at least in my conditions.  The plants I have placed outdoors have all gone dormant in winter but not come back the next year.  My indoor plants of this species are not deciduous, but retain their leaves all year.

Grooming

Grooming S. amambayensis for show can be frustrating, because of its sticky leaves.  It produces abundant pollen, the pollen drops on the leaves where it is almost impossible to remove completely, and judges sometimes mistake the pollen for mildew.

A picture shows one possible explanation for the leaf stickiness: S. amambayensis fighting back against its enemies.

Quantity of Bloom

At the 2006 Gesneriad Society convention in Rochester, New York, Carol Hamelink of Laurel, Maryland, exhibited a very nice plant of S. amambayensis, with four vigorous shoots.  The judges marked it down for "quantity of bloom", leading to a post-convention discussion on the Gesneriphiles mailing list.  Mauro Peixoto wrote that a stem of this plant normally has only two flowers open at any given time; the flowers at the next node up the stem open about the time that the previous two are falling.  I went to check my own plant, which had seven sprawling stems (and therefore didn't look nearly as attractive as Carol's show plant), and sure enough each of the stems had only two flowers.

Even though the species does not usually have a large number of flowers open at one time, it does have a long blooming season, from late spring or early summer deep into winter.  The bright green foliage and bright red flowers are very cheerful in December and January.

Fruit

Sinningia amambayensis has an unusual fruit.  There is lousy picture and a discussion.

The Mamba Group

A number of sinningia species have the following properties:

• Plain green, hairy, sticky leaves
• Red, tubular flowers
• Exserted anthers

The species are

• S. amambayensis
• S. aggregata
• S. araneosa

S. nordestina (anthers barely exserted) is similar, and S. valsuganensis might also qualify.

I call this group of species the Mamba Group.  They are all in the Corytholoma clade.  The nuclear DNA data have these three species quite close, and S. valsuganensis not far away, although S. nordestina is somewhat distant.  However, the chloroplast DNA gives conflicting results, so it is unclear whether the Mamba Group is a taxonomic reality or just a product of convergent evolution.

Hybridization

I have done two crosses with S. amambayensis.  The results looked a lot like S. amambayensis.  Especially, they felt a lot like S. amambayensis: the same sticky leaves!

One cross was with S. sulcata, using pollen supplied by Jon Dixon.  The resulting plants tended to have one primary stem, unlike the bushy amambayensis parent.  The flowers were the same general shape as those of S. amambayensis, but the corolla lobes were a peachy color, both inside and out, which was a nice effect.  The most distinctive feature was the pistil: the stigma extended waaaay beyond the corolla tube (see the picture below).

While the plants of the above cross were clearly different from the S. amambayensis seed parent, the same cannot be said with 100% certainty of the results of the other cross (which was actually done a year earlier).  The flowers of S. amambayensis x nordestina (if that's what it truly is and not a selfing) are very similar to those of S. amambayensis, except for two main differences.  First, there are 3-4 flowers per axil, instead of the one (or, occasionally, two) in the case of S. amambayensis.  Also, the style and stigma are very thick and "muscular" by comparison with that of the seed parent.  Declaring this plant to be the True Cross (aside from the theological hazard) is also a little iffy because nothing about it reminds one of S. nordestina.

Could this be a selfing of S. amambayensis?  The two main visible differences, the thickness and color of the style and the number of flowers per axil, certainly seem within the possible variation of the seed parent species.  On the other hand, I have raised selfings of S. amambayensis and not seen plants like this.  So unless further evidence disproves my hypothesis, I'm going to go with the identification of this plant as S. amambayensis x nordestina.

Here is a table which compares the three plants.

Feature table for Sinningia amambayensis

Publication

Chautems, 1992.

Etymology: Amambaya + -ensis ("resident of").  Sierra de Amambaya is in Paraguay.