Note: The first part of this post was originally made on Facebook on Saturday, September 18, 2016. The post proved fairly popular and was shared nearly 50 times and liked well over 400 times. (Just sayin’! Cool plants do that!)

Yesterday we came across these giant candelabra lily bulbs (Brunsvigia orientalis) growing at the Grootbos Nature Reserve on the southeastern shores of South Africa’s Walker Bay. B. orientalis has obviously giant bulbs with impressively large leaf rosettes approximately a meter across on the largest specimens. The flat, roughly hexagonal leaf rosettes are present from fall through spring, then die back for the summer dry season. Unimaginable spherical flower spikes containing dozens of deep red florets emerge at the end of the summer dry season before the leaves do, when little else is blooming in the fynbos ecosystem. We were here at the wrong time to see flowering, but imagine me partially hidden by what looks like a floral firework to get a sense of what happens during that time. Or just google some images. Seriously, do it. These are one of the Cape’s coolest plants.

Here’s one more photo of the giant Brunsvigia orientalis rosettes at the Grootbos Nature Reserve with Walker Bay curving away in the background. Jessie and Kevin are shown for scale.

Mark photographs the giant leaf rosettes, set amongst a constellation of saturated orange gazanias.

Someone noted in a comment that there must not be very many large animals around to trample upon the wide, flat leaves. And indeed, that is true. The fynbos ecosystem is rich in plants and small animals, birds, insects, etc, but sparse in large ones. This is due to poor soils and tough vegetation and dry conditions much of the summer, all of which contribute to few big animals being able to survive here.

Another comment asked about the estimated age of these large bulbous plants. I’ve read that the largest amaryllids (species such as Brunsvigia and Boophone) can easily live for 80 to 100 years and in the wild can require 15-20 years before reaching blooming size. I wouldn’t be surprised if the plants above were a minimum of 40-50 years old at this stage. There’s no precise way to date bulbs since they lack the woody growth rings present in dicot trees and shrubs which can be counted; but given their long journey from pea-sized seeds  to bulbs weighing 4 to 5 pounds or more, that seems like a reasonable guess.

The above three photos of Brunsvigia orientalis flowers were taken by my Facebook friend Annette Koch in March 2016. She said they were growing along the St Blaize Trail between Mosselbay and Danabay, closer to Danabay. I have not yet seen these plants in bloom myself since I’ve not been in South Africa at the correct time of year for it.

My friend Neil took a photo of himself with B. orientalis in bloom on March 18, 2015. March is the end of the South African summer and the start of autumn, and that is when the leafless flower spikes emerge.

The photo above and the next two photos below are borrowed from Strange Wonderful Things, a website that highlights some very amazing plant species from around the world.

Droplets of mist condense upon the scapes and pedicels of the flowers.

What showy plants!

This photo comes via the Wasteland Botanicals website of a habitat plant growing on sand.

_________________________________________________________________

Below is a selection of other Brunsvigia types. There are approximately a dozen species, primarily in South Africa, occurring in various climate zones from winter rainfall western ones, to summer rainfall grassland types in the interior, and eastern coastal scrub plants which receive some precipitation all year long. Bloom times vary with the habitat. All are showy and beautiful, as Amaryllids so often are.

Brunsvigia bosmaniae is one of the absolute best species. This photo of them in mass bloom near Nieuwoudtville in the Northern Cape Province is simply stunning and very memorable. It was snapped by Hendrik Van Zijl in March 2013.

A couple of white B. bosmaniae stand out amidst their pink brethren. Also called Maartblom in Afrikaans, or March flower/March lily in English, the common name refers to the primary bloom time. This species is worth a separate post to show its life cycle at some point, but for now I’ll just add these couple of images to illustrate how terrific they truly are.

The two photos above are of Brunsvigia grandiflora. It flowers in pink in the fynbos of the Western Cape. Photos from Strange Wonderful Things.

The two photos above are of Brunsvigia gregaria, a summer-blooming species. The closer up photo of the spike blooming in grassland was taken near Cathcart Farm. I do not know the locale of the coastal photograph, unfortunately.

One of my favorite in the genus is the stellar Brunsvigia josephinae. This one is probably the largest of the Brunsvigias, reaching about 3 feet tall and with bulbs weighing upwards of 5 lbs each. All three of the photos above come from Ken Blackford, a good friend who grows these and numerous other amaryllids in San Diego, California. The photos are of his 8 to 12 year old, seed-grown garden plants between 2009 and 2014. It should be noted that the third photo just above this caption is actually of an intergeneric hybrid Ken made between B. josephinae and the related genus Amaryllis belladonna. It looks a lot like straight-up B. josephinae but apparently it is half Amaryllis.

These three photos are all of Brunsvigia litoralis, another coastal species that favors the southern coastline of the Western and Eastern Cape Provinces. The first photo is of plants growing at the University of California Berkeley, by Ken Blackford. The second photo is from the Pacific Bulb Society near Port Elizabeth, Eastern Cape. And the last photo is of plants breaking dormancy in late summer at the University of California Irvine, also by Ken Blackford.

The prior three photos were of the strikingly scarlet Brunsvigia marginata. A Cape fynbos species that tends to flower strongly after fires, the top photo comes from Rachel Saunders via the Pacific Bulb Society. The other two are from Biodiversity Explorer taken by Colin Paterson-Jones. Evidently all the photos were taken at Du Toit’s Kloof Pass in the Western Cape.

Finally, we have Brunsvigia striata, a relatively small species that grows in the drier regions of the Northern and Western Cape, including what appears to be a quartz field. Photo by Etwin Aslander, another Facebook friend of mine, taken near Ladismith in the Little Karoo, on Saturday, March 26, 2016.

I’ve tried about 40 bulbs of several of these aforementioned species thus far in my garden in Western Arizona. I bought some from Ken Blackford in San Diego in January 2016, and he gave me others to try since he had numerous seedlings from his breeding efforts. I wanted to know how well they might do, since some species are clearly desert-adapted.

As of this writing in Sept 2018, not quite 3 years later, it appears that Brunsvigia bosmaniae is surviving, which was somewhat expected given their desert habitat which is in many ways quite similar to that of my gardens. The coastal species B. josephinae was a total failure, with the bulbs rotting within the first year during the intense summer heat, despite their dormancy and me trying to keep them dry. So far a couple of surprise survivors are B. orientalis and B. litoralis, or at least several individuals of each. Not every bulb I planted of either species has made it but there are those who have returned for two years, and I am hopeful for the third in 2018, assuming that it actually rains again sometime this fall. I have not had the opportunity to try the other species featured yet. If they continue to survive and one day bloom (!) then I will surely be blogging about that!