Some of my favorite flowers , the Red Hot Pokers , are just starting to come into flower in our garden these days .
These unfearing perennial aboriginal to South Africa were calledTritoma uvariafor several hundred year , but there was some confusedness due to the fact that there was a genus of beetle that also used the same name .
Finally in the twentieth century , the Botanical Congress cleared the disarray by changing the plant ’s genus name toKniphofia , to respect an eighteenth century German phytologist name Johan Kniphof .
So now , the plants are still called Tritomas , but their prescribed botanic name isKniphofia . There are about twenty species in the Kniphofia genus , but this one species , Kniphofia uvaria , is responsible for about 95 percent of the horticultural trade .
Tritomas are moderately rugged plants and will tolerate a fair amount of moth-eaten , perhaps down to 14 degrees Fahrenheit , and they are often called for in drought - resistant landscape intent .
The young plant are a bit wearisome to spread at first and while they may bloom when immature they do n’t make a salutary show until the clump is three or four years quondam and there are at least five or six works in the clump . I ’m happy that my oldest clump has 16 flower spike coming up this year , as that will make a really good show .
I ’ve also get several other young lump and will get a handful of blooms from each of those , but nothing like the huge lamp produced by the main glob .
Although I have also planted a few yellow blooming Tritomas , the independent variety we have in the garden is the classic orangeness Pfitzer type .
Wilhelm Pfitzer was a famous German nurseryman in the mid-18th 100 and he develop this superior melodic line from wild plants . Pfitzer was a big developer of new varieties of dahlias , cannas and gladiola and he is certainly one of the reason that these garden specie are so popular in the garden of today .
His was one of the rife nurseries in Europe for more than seventy - five years , up until the Second World War , and many of the varieties that he developed ( likeKniphofia uvariavar . Pfitzer ) are still rife in their categories .
The plants do n’t show up in retail nurseries too often because their foliage is unkempt in containers and when the plants bloom they are too top - heavy to display well .
Luckily the mail rescript and internet suppliers have a gravid range of different Kniphofia for sale . The small plants one buys will take a few years to really get going , but once they are establish , they will last for many years without needing to be divided . In our garden , the Tritomas will flower from now until January and will attract ambrosia loving birds like hummingbirds and other saccharide eaters .
Amazingly , both dotty and feral Red Hot Pokers are often regard a gage in South Africa and feral plants have spread widely in Australia . One can get a number of websites that give advice as to how to get free of this pest !
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