Description
This is a gorgeous plant with good-sized, rich, bright-violet flowers each with a golden yellow-orange throat and, characteristically, a short style. The back of the petals is beautifully marked with violet flame patterns and old-gold filigrees. It makes a superb display of flower after flower in March and April with the small plants covered ingood-sized, vivid and conspicuous, wide-open blooms held close to the ground. It’s a magnificent thing, easily grown under the same conditions as for other Romulea or Crocus in a sharply-drained, loam-based compost with good drainage and it is ideal in a pan under glass. It is also hardy and robust enough to thrive outside in a well-drained, fertile, sunny spot and it was grown like this by the late Netta Statham of Erway farm in Shropshire, for many years.
It has been spread by seed lists under the name of R. ramiflora (along with another imposter, which is also not R. ramiflora) especially when it is grown on the west coast of the USA, but it seems that at last the true nature of at least one ramiflora imposter has been elucidated, it is Romulea bulbocodium Knightshayes Form.
(Incidentally we now have two verified stocks of the true-to-name R. ramiflora available elsewhere on the website).
