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[email protected] · 18-08-2009, 08:13 PM posted to uk.rec.gardening

On Tue, 18 Aug 2009 15:01:37 +0100 (BST), wrote:

In article ,
Spider wrote:

Does anyone in this group grow Strelizia, or know how to divide it, please?

Yes and no, respectively, though I have divided it.

I get the impression it could be an horrendous job, possibly somewhat
destructive, but there is no detail to guide me. I would *really*
appreciate some advice.

That's my experience. I had to, because it had cracked its pot, and
I couldn't lift a larger one. I cut through its base and attempted
to do as little damage to the roots as possible, but had to cut out
and remove about half of them (because I had cut them through higher
up). The plants did not flower the next year.

Regards,
Nick Maclaren.

Hi Spider
I have much the same story as Nick with regard to dividing. I got a
couple of seeds to germinate from a pack brought back from Tenerife in
the late 1990s. Of the two resulting plants, one flowered at around 5
years and the other a year or two later. They were kept growing
indoors throughout all that time in a lounge next to full-length south
west facing glass windows / patio doors. With time they became very
large and the fat fleshy roots outgrew their plastic pots and
eventually protruded (and became stuck) through the holes at the
bottom of the pot, so eventually I had to release the plants by
cutting the pots away. I then took a sharp knife and basically
bisected the root system (fairly arbitrarily) without damaging the
leafy stems, so that each original plant became separated into two
halves that went into their own new pots. I used peat based compost in
which to grow them. I gave two of the four new plants away (not sure
if they survived in my friends' hands) and the other two that I kept
for myself have continued to grow fine. However, in the last few
years I have left them outside for the summer to be exposed to the
Eastern Scottish climate, and although their ability to produce new
leaves has not seemed to suffer at all from this, I have not since had
any flower spikes develop when I have brought them back into the same
place in the lounge to overwinter from about September onwards. The
plants are currently again getting quite big now, and as an
experiment, I have not put them outside over the summer this year to
see if this makes any difference to the flowering (or lack of it in
recent years).

Geoff
Dundee