exposure by Rick Gush
The Red Hot Poker flora popping up in my garden are a welcome ease from the dull , dreary conditions that hits Rapallo , Italy , this time of year .
It ’s grizzly - conditions metre here in Rapallo , Italy , and on estimable days we all walk around wearing long underwear and a crowd of jackets . I have n’t worked inthe gardenfor at least a calendar month now because it ’s not as much playfulness when everything is moth-eaten and wet .
But there is one large beam of light of sunshine beaming into this picture , and that is the fact that the Red Hot Poker plants are all in full bloom ; their big , orange and yellowed prime light up the hillside like an army of common mullein . I ’ve been attempt to distribute these perennial and spread them across the garden , and it looks like the scheme is compensate off .
I estimate that we have more than a hundred flower in the garden this winter . Not too regretful for a single shoot that I appropriated from the neighbor ’s condominium garden a few days ago . I ’ll count when all the little clumps maturate in a few years we ’ll have several hundred flower to ignite up the dreary winter garden . Perhaps the local air dealings will be able to use our garden as a character stage on logy days .
Red Hot Poker plants are correctly cognise asKniphofia uvariathese days , but back when I was a youthful gardener they were still calledTritoma uvaria . I opine it was back in the tardy sixties when the Botanical Congress decide the name had to be vary , because a genus of beetle had a anterior title to the nameTritoma . Sort of like whenTrachelospermum(star jasmine ) becameRhynchospermumin the seventies , and all the glasshouse had to change their labeling and all the garden books had to change their text for star jasmine .
These plants are most commonly call Red Hot Poker , partially because that ’s what they see like , but also because lots of the great unwashed seem to have fuss pronouncingKniphofia . The correct pronunciation is knife - oh - fee - ahh . Perhaps four syllables are too much in this tight paced world .
Kniphofiavarieties exist in a number of dissimilar prime colors , from yellow to Marxist to green , but the big orangeness and yellow flush that we ’re growing are by far the most mutual and are probably the descendent of thePfitzervariety plants that a German nurseryman build up in the nineteenth century .
I ’m always disport to know that while I ’m coddling all myKniphofia , website in South Africa and Australia keep to offer advice as to how to control this irritating weed . I also chuckle at how all the garden catalog , even those here in Italy , talk about howKniphofiawill bloom every summertime . I do , in fact , seeKniphofiablooming in other the great unwashed ’s garden in the summertime , and back in California , that ’s they way they behave . I ’m not at all sure why mine flower in December and January , but on these grayish days , I ’m certainly happy with the issue .
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