Description
Two upright or slightly arching, mid-green, slightly-glaucous leaves and 4-10 (or even 12) lovely, gentian blue star-shaped, 3cm flowers with white centres bloom very early in March and April . C. siehei has larger and more numerous flowers than C. forbesii and they are outward-facing. Flower colour in siehei is more inclined to a violet-blue and the white eye is both larger and more obvious. The plant offered is what we believe to the the actual, real, true-to-name, C. siehei!
The explanation of the names is not easy. Grab a chair and a cuppa and read on. Bulbs of so-called C. siehei were, for many years, mis-identified in horticulture, when what was being grown was in fact C. luciliae. More recently the name siehei itself has been merged (by some botanists) with forbesii however this conclusion is unsound and appears to have been based on plants that are not actually true C. forbesii in the first place (rather they were forbesii of horticulture which were mostly variants of C. siehei anyway. (C. forbesii remains a different and separate species)! The confusion is widespread; it is recorded that several entries in the RHS trial of “small blue bulbs” were submitted incorrectly as C. forbesii but later identified as C. siehei!
(Just for the record C. luciliae has even larger flowers than C. siehei but these are upward-facing, pale lavender, with a large but fuzzy-margined, central white eye).
AGM RHS 1993 (reconfirmed).
