Gloriosa Lilies, Poppy, and Godetias

Gloriosa lilies are another highly anticipated flowers to bloom these past few weeks. Actually, several flowers in this post are “highly anticipated” such as the Danish Flag poppy and the godetias.

The gloriosa lilies are my probably my favorite flowers to photograph. They have fascinating colors and shapes. They are usually red with yellow or pink with yellow. They remind me of a spider. Gloriosa lilies are pretty rare to see, I’ve never seen them at local garden stores. They are available online but not too many people have them or they are usually out of stock.

I was lucky and found a few of them several years ago. I have about five bulbs and currently two are flowering and one is getting ready to. The other two I just repotted because I had them too deep in the pot and they didn’t grow. Once they die back down, I keep them dry in the pot under the patio roof until early next spring. In the spring I take it out in a partial shade spot and water them every other day in the hot summer.

Currently my gloriosas are under some big tacoma stans bushes. I thought it would be a great idea to grow them under these bushes so that I don’t have to use any plant stakes because gloriosa lilies are vines. I’m debating whether I should do this again because it is hard to pick out the gloriosa flowers from the tacoma stans flowers as they are also orange! Plus, it doesn’t make a good background to make an impact in photographing the lilies. The green branches in the tacoma are making it look busy.

The flower colors starts out a lime green when it opens, then it gets more yellow, then red, and finally a purple once it dies. It opens up like a parachute and then pulls its wings all the way back up, and then when it dies it fans out like when it first opened. Such an AMAZING plant!

I think last July I had the best photos of these gloriosa lilies. Check them out in the archive.

POPPY “Danish Flag”

I planted every poppy seeds I have this year and so far I have only two that flowered. There were about 6 different varieties. The other poppy I showed you was a few weeks ago. I may have another one coming up but I’m not sure what color it will be. Poppies are very hard to grow, at least for me. Every year, I put in over 30 seeds for all varieties and only a few flower. Most of the time the heat kills them.

Fortunately, this beautiful “Danish Flag” poppy survived and gave me the best flower ever! I tried growing this last year and it didn’t survive. It is a salmon pink with white in the center! I plan to save the seeds for next year.

GODETIA

Oh, this godetia is so freakin’ cute! It reminded me of some of my adeniums (desert flowers). I grew these from seeds in the winter and it finally flowered. What’s so special is that not only did I get one perfect flower but I got TWO perfect flower! That’s really exciting because last year I tried growing these two and they didn’t make it to flowering.

I feel so blessed to have all these flowers in bloom today. Each year, you win on some plants and lose on others.

I hope these brought a smile to your face! Have a nice day and a wonderful rest of the week!