2024 Update — Another fun update, as this plant is now in full bloom in the greenhouse and seems to be happy. It has two stalks this year, both with flowers. I love how it blooms over a long period. I am hoping for seeds this year with all the flowers and it seems likely it will get pollinated. The tuber is about 4″ across now and I worry that rats or slugs will eat out the growth tips and leave me without one of these special caudiciform plants. 6.23.24

The concept of “volunteers” in the garden is a common, well-known one. This is when plants reseed themselves around and sometimes you like it and sometimes not (usually, I like it a lot). I never expected it in the greenhouse, though, but volunteerism there has provided some wonderful surprises.

Our day six plant is a very surprising volunteer–it is Sinningia leucotricha. This seedling is now about five years old. Its appearance was timely. I had a mother plant, one I had purchased at City People’s and kept alive and happy-ish for about ten years. The bulb grew and grew and the plant’s leaves got bigger and bigger as did its caudex and it bloomed every year. It went dormant in the winter and then leafed out and bloomed in the spring. But one year it didn’t bother to wake up. The bulk seemed solid, still, so I hung on to it, but it had passed on to the Gesneriad patch in the sky.

Around that time, I was cleaning up all the pots in the greenhouse and thankfully noticed a very tiny seedling with a tiny bulb on it. I was extremely surprised because I never noticed the parent plant going to seed and Sinningia seeds are notoriously tiny. But somehow, there it was. A photo of that plant from 2016 is below.

The plant grew quickly and had a few flowers in September of this year.

Here is the plant as it looks today:

My hope is that I’ll get a few more flowers this year. For care, this plant likes well-drained soil with lots of sand. Repotting seems tricky, so I’ll avoid it until the caudex fills the pot. I’ll fertilize it lightly through the growing season.

Because this plant sowed itself and grew, I felt like I could tackle tiny seeds of the Gesneriad clan and have since started Sinningia speciosa and Chirita tamiana seeds with decent success.