Crocosmia are summer blooming bulbs with exotic, brightly-colored flowers on wiry, arching stems. The buds open one-by-one from the bottom up and are magnets for hummingbirds.
Typically planted in the spring, these warm-weather bloomers usually don’t survive cold winters if the bulbs are left in the ground.
The Crocosmia is also known as the montbretia. These plants have a tendency to become invasive. The flowers and foliage of these plants arch slightly, with some ending up at 2 to 3 feet tall.
Many of these types of plants have red-orange flowers atop a stem, and the flowers open progressively from the base to the top. They can be evergreen or deciduous perennials that grow from basal underground corms.
The alternate leaves are cauline and ensiform (sword shaped). The blades are parallel-veined. The margin is entire. The corms form in vertical chains with the youngest at the top and oldest and largest buried most deeply in the soil.
The roots of the lowermost corm in a chain are contractile roots and drag the corm deeper into the ground where conditions allow. The chains of corms are fragile and easily separated, a quality that has enabled some species to become invasive and difficult to control in the garden.
They have colourful inflorescences of 4 to 20 vivid red and orange subopposite flowers on a divaricately (horizontally) branched stem. The terminal inflorescence can have the form of a cyme or a raceme.
These flower from early summer well into fall. The flowers are sessile on a flexuose arched spike. The fertile flowers are hermaphroditic. All stamens have an equal length. The style branches are apically forked.
They are pollinated by insects, birds (sunbirds) or by the wind. The dehiscent capsules are shorter than they are wide. The alternative name montbretia is still widely used.
The genus name is derived from the Greek words krokos, meaning “saffron”, and osme, meaning “odor” – from the dried leaves emitting a strong smell like that of saffron (a spice derived from Crocus – another genus belonging to the Iridaceae) – when immersed in hot water.
We’ll be sharing more about this flower in future.
