Description
This species, from the USA, opens in the late afternoon with chalice-shaped, fragrant flowers of pale yellow (darker on the opening day) each with a very small green eye in the centre of the flower. The medium-sized flowers are about 3.5-4cm in diameter on stems 20-30cm tall and have a short tube, behind the bloom. Zephyranthes jonesii makes quite small bulbs, some 2cm across and although these do make offsets now and again, offsets are rare. However they produce plenty of seed which is fully fertile and this comes true to type.
Flowering is between June and October and the plant is readily grown as for other Zephyranthes in cultivation. It perhaps benefits from extra water in Spring, to ensure good growth and good bulb size, but this may be imagined rather than real, it is just hard to say.
Zephyranthes jonesii is a very limited endemic of a tiny area of Texas on the coastal bend, in San Patricio and Refugio counties where it is said to be found mostly in more poorly-drained soils and often in swales.
This species may have had discernible hybrid ancestry in the ancient past but it is now a perfectly valid and stable species in its own right (this is the way that the European Bison, which we think of as a species but which in fact an ancient hybrid, came into being)! Detailed studies by Flagg and Flory (in the 1976 Amaryllis year book), demonstrate that it is a stabilised species resulting from an ancestral cross between two other species which still both exist and which overlap slightly in their distribution; the white, evening- and night-blooming Z. chlorosolen (seen as Z.herbertiana in older literature) and the yellow, day-blooming Z. pulchella. The natural cross arose between diploid forms of both, each parent having 2n=48 and Z. jonesii has this same level of 2n=48. Suggestions that Habranthus tubispathus is somehow involved in the parentage is most definitely and demonstrably incorrect and was, perhaps, a slip of the pen subsequently perpetuated in literature.
