Description
Usually a short plant of 10 cm although robust specimens can treble this. The leaves form a wavy-edged basal rosette from which a stem carries several widely open, stunning white chalices of heavy texture. These have specks and spickles of dark maroon all over.
To my mind one of the loveliest of the more “growable” Californian species. Here offered in a high altitude form, fully cold-hardy, but liking lots of water in the spring and a dryish summer rest. The bulbs are always small, spindly and look very inadequate, it is just how the plant is.
For skilled growers and very careful cultivation under alpine glass in a sharply-drained compost, this needs to be based on sterilised loam with lots of rounded drainage material incorporated and management of most of these Californian species is something of a skilled art, providing them with the right conditions whilst staving off the potential advances of soil fungi which seem to plague quite a few of the so-called “serpentine endemics” when they are brought into cultivation.
