Dear Miss Floribunda,
Last year, not much of what I planted in the spring survived a summer my neighbors and I called Death Valley Days. I watered often, but it was an ordeal for me and didn’t save the plants. It was so discouraging that I have decided to switch to houseplants I can tend in air-conditioned comfort. I did come to the Hyattsville Horticulture Society seed sale in February, basically for the baked goods and camaraderie, but instead of seeds I bought plants.
The purple spiderwort, the oyster plant and the Christmas cactus are doing fine, but the cyclamens I bought look ghastly. The flowers have fallen off, and the leaves are patchy brown and yellow and drooping. I looked at a YouTube video that advised an east- or north-facing window, so I moved them from my kitchen table to a window facing east. Per YouTube, I stopped watering them until the soil dried out. However, they are not looking any better. Is there anything I can do to revive them, or should I just decide they are too fussy for me and throw them on a compost pile?
Ready to Recycle My Cyclamens on Livingston Street
Photo Credit: Public Domain Pictures
Dear Ready to Recycle,
Please don’t give up on spring planting, but rather start your seeds indoors so that you can plant strong seedlings before the dog days of summer charge in. For example, whole crops of peas, radishes, spinach and lettuce can be enjoyed during the cooler days of spring. Early tomatoes started indoors will give you a good return before the temperatures near 100 F keep them from setting fruit.
The Hyattsville Horticulture Society (HHS) is going to have a seed-starting workshop that I urge you to attend. It will take place at the municipal center on Saturday, March 15, from 10 a.m. to noon. Dr. Julie Wolf, plant physiologist and soil scientist, will show slides and share her expertise. If you buy any of the seeds left over from the February sale, you can talk with savvy area gardeners who can give you advice more exactly suited to the Hyattsville microclimate than the scant information on the back of the seed packets. These hands-on experts will also let you know which vegetables and flowers did well for area gardeners last year and which are not worth the risk this year.
Please don’t throw away your cyclamen. My British house-plant expert, Prunella Potworthy, surmises that because you stopped watering them and because they are in the warmth of the kitchen, these cool-weather bloomers are going dormant.
Also, she suspects you might have splashed water on their leaves, which they hate. Like African violets, they prefer to be watered from the bottom and allowed to dry out between waterings. Water on their leaves causes them to rot. I suspect you have never tried to nurture African violets, or you might have thought of this because there are many similarities — so many that even some online “experts” claim they are from the same family, Gesneriaceae.
Actually, cyclamen are from the Primulaceae family and are far more closely related to primroses than African violets are to violets. However, their sensitivity to water on their leaves is characteristic of gesneriads, as is the cyclamen’s clumping habit and refusal to bloom unless pot bound. Plants from both of these families grow under protective tree canopies, but this is where the similarities of habitat end. They come from radically different parts of the world with extremely dissimilar climates. While African violets nestle among tree roots in the tropical rainforest, cyclamen spread around the trunks of trees in forests in the Mediterranean, particularly Greece and Lebanon.
Unlike everblooming African violets, cyclamen need summer dormancy. In their Mediterranean habitat, the summers are hot and dry, and so they shrink back into themselves. Unlike African violets, they grow from tubers which provide them with enough stored moisture to maintain life till the weather cools.
They will put forth new shoots and growth in autumn and bloom in the mild Mediterranean winter. In fact, you need to keep them cool in your house, which is why Prunella believes you should move them out of the kitchen into a somewhat underheated room. Their ideal blooming temperature is from 50 to 65 F. A temperature much over 70 F will cause them to go dormant as they do in the wild during summer.
It is a pity you can’t plant them outside, but our winter temperatures are still much too cold, and so what you have, Cyclamen persicum, have to be houseplants. There is a hardy but less showy variety, Cyclamen hederifolium, that can survive winters in zones as far north as New England, although it is usually grown in the Pacific Northwest, and you might want to give it a try. Prunella tells me it has naturalized in her native England very well.
If you come to the HHS workshop you will meet Prunella, Aunt Sioux, Dave Greenfingers, Wendy Wildflower and others who know how to coax usually discarded gift plants, including poinsettias and amaryllis, back into bloom. They have told me that the key is knowing what conditions a gift plant responds to in its natural habitat.
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Miss Floribunda writes about gardening for the Life & Times. You may email her at Floribundav@gmail.com.
