Description
When first introduced to cultivation many years ago in the times of E.A. Bowles, this was know only as a vinous-purple flowered plant with slender blooms composed of narrow, twisted petals. The colour made it very desirable, however the actual appearance of the flowers was not really very attractive. Subsequent discoveries by J&K Persson, Jim Archibald and Kerndorff & Pasche have shown a much wider range of variation exists within this species.
It is characterised by relatively narrow petals of soft-violet to purple, a white throat, incurving yellow anthers and a small, barely branched yellow to orange style buried deep in the anthers. This stock was raised by seed and splitting from a collection (88-50) made by the Perssons over 30 years ago. It has bright soft violet-purple flowers with yellow anthers and styles. It has some similarities in colour with C. pallasii (C. dispathaceus was originally thought to be a subspecies of C. pallasii) though the diagnostic features all point to it actually being C. dispathaceus, under which name it was collected originally.
We do find the deep-purple forms of this species more tricky to grow, they are more inclined to be desert plants and do not suit our cultivation methods (and it isn’t sour grapes when we say that the deeply-coloured forms are really not very pretty), however this slightly paler stock does well and increases nicely by both seed and division.
Originally from JP.88-50; Turkey, Province Konya, 40 km from Beysehir to Akseki, 1,450m.
Introduced to our lists May 2019.
