Description
The mysterious green flowered, autumn-blooming species from a small region of south western Spain and adjacent North Africa.
Starry, spidery, highly fragrant, dusky emerald-green flowers are made in October, when you get the conditions right. These have a shallow, flaring cup and six, spidery petals arrange (as in all Narcissus) in two whorls each of three identical petals, however the two sets do differ from each other very slightly. The flowers are solitary or with up to four per scape on the most robust plants. The scent is sweet and light, but with a slightly heavy undertone not found in the white autumnal species. I have never seen reported anywhere, but each of the outer three petals has a curious white, almost fluffy excrescence towards the tip of the inner surface. This looks just like a mealy bug or woolly aphis, but it is actually a part of the petal and presumably has some evolutionary significance, I am guessing to do with attracting pollinators. There is a smaller, but similar structure towards to tips of the inner whorl, but it is more on the outside of the petal. This is present, in the same place, on all flowers on all plants. It is not a pest of any kind, it a part of the flower. You can see these curious tissue developments on some of the pictures in the gallery, especially numbers 4 and 5.
In the years that this flowers the bulb makes no leaves at all and instead it relies on its flowering stalk for photosynthesis. In the years that it misses flowering, it makes just a single, rush-like leaf (and this stays green very late into the growing season).
All in all strange, but this is truly fascinating and worth growing for the scent alone. Frankly this is not that easy to grow and even less easy to do well with. This is not a species for beginners and most certainly it is not ever one for the outside garden in the UK.
This needs a well-drained, very fertile, loam-based compost in full sun (in the UK this will always be in a pot or bulb frame). It will not tolerate peat-based or organic composts, it much prefers a heavy loam-based compost but one with good drainage. Fertility is essential to build bulb-size. The other thing that we find it needs is a good summer rest. This needs to be long and hot but it must not be so severe that the bulbs become shrivelled. It’s a tricky balance between ripening the bulbs and dehydrating them. We start it into growth late in autumn with a tepid drench (an inundation) of weak, high-nitrogen fertiliser. We then leave the (plunged) pots for 10 days and then repeat this, before resuming gentle watering in a more usual pattern. This trick usually breaks dormancy and promotes flowering, but it doesn’t always work and the plant can, sometimes, simply stay below ground for a whole season.
Seed is similarly capricious, sometimes germinating well soon after sowing, at other times it stays dormant for an entire year or (most usually) it doesn’t come up at all. Fresh seed (from your own plants) is vastly superior to other seed, stored seed is, we find, very unsatisfactory, germinating at best very sporadically and at worst, not at all.
All in all, this species needs understanding, experience, skill, more understanding and a dose of luck to grow well. Incidentally, it is slow to increase and slower still from seed.
