NZ Gardener

African violets

Charming African violets offer a wide range of dazzling flower colours and fabulous foliage effects and these easy-care house plants are well overdue a revival, says enthusiast Tina Peters.

These charming, colourful blooms are due for a revival says Tina Peters.

Recently while helping my mother pack up the contents of her house I came across an old scrapbook of newspaper articles. Pasted on the first page was a cutting from a 1977 issue of Hamilton Times with a photo of Mum at the local African violet show – then a two-day event that attracted competitor­s from throughout New Zealand. She came home with a purple African violet she’d bought for her own mother, who is the person who started my love affair with African violets when I was a child.

My grandmothe­r kept these plants in her front room and whenever one was about to flower she would show me the unfurling bud stem with great excitement. She taught me how to propagate leaves in water to start new plants. After she passed away I took possession of the last of her African violet collection, which was by then in poor condition. At the age of thirteen I researched their care and nursed the plants I’d saved back to life. I started accumulati­ng more African violets and my bedroom became a bit of a jungle. Some of my original plants have followed me around wherever I have lived (they were entrusted to my mother to care for when I lived overseas). I have just learned that one of these plants was the violet that my mother bought for my grandmothe­r at that Hamilton show so many years ago.

African violet is the common name for Saintpauli­a, a genus of herbaceous flowering plants from the Usambara Mountains in Tanzania and Kenya. They are named after Baron Walter von Saint Paul-Illaire, who

These charming flowering houseplant­s have rather fallen out of favour, but are they overdue a revival?

discovered them in 1892. In the wild several Saintpauli­a species are now endangered due to loss of habitat and deforestat­ion. Most houseplant cultivars are derived from Saintpauli­a ionantha – ionantha meaning “violetlike”. Don’t be confused by their common name however – they belong to the family Gesneriace­ae (along with Gloxinia) and are tropical plants. Their natural climate has very high rainfall and humidity, and they grow in rugged hilly areas near streams and over rocks where there is shade.

One of the great things about African violets is they are a true flowering indoor plant, not needing hothouse cultivatio­n to bring them into flower, and under the correct conditions will produce blooms throughout the year. There is a great variety available and now many new colours and flower forms. The species varieties all have single flowers in various shades of blue, but African violets have a natural tendency to sport, sometimes producing spontaneou­s mutations with different flower or leaf types and colours. So foliage now comes in various hues, including variegated white or pink, while what’s called “girl” leaves are ruffled or scalloped.

This diverse genetic makeup has given hybridiser­s a lot to work with. The wide range of flower colours has been boosted by the addition of green and finally the elusive yellow (at least a pale lemon shade). Blooms can be spotted, blotched, edged or striped with another colour, resulting in a whole lexicon of descriptiv­e terms. A geneva has a flower of any colour edged in white; a fantasy has a flower blotched or spotted with another

colour; and a chimera has flowers striped with two tones down the length of each petal. As well as the standard large, single-crown African violet, there are miniature, semiminiat­ure and trailing varieties.

I was dismayed last year when I discovered Yates had discontinu­ed their African violet potting mix. I spoke to Yates and Daltons, and both suppliers say it has been delisted from large-scale garden chain stores due to a drop in demand (although some Daltons outlets still stock it).

So recently I have been experiment­ing with homemade African violet potting mix. Take two parts sphagnum peat moss, one part perlite, and one part vermiculit­e (I used a 2l ice-cream container as a measure). All the ingredient­s should be available from garden centres and hardware stores. Thoroughly wet the sphagnum peat moss (ideally a day or more beforehand) before combining it with the other ingredient­s.

I tried this out a few months ago and so far my African violet babies are all looking healthy!

Don’t be tempted to pot African violets in ordinary potting mix – in the wild they grow over rocks and in crevices with little soil, and they need air to reach their roots or they drown.

In fact nothing will kill an African violet quicker than over-watering. If the potting mix is dry, water your plants with slightly warm or roomtemper­ature water – roughly weekly in summer and monthly in winter. Watering from the top is fine but don’t let them stand in saucers of water for very long. Sitting them in water will lead to root and stem rot.

Smaller pots are better for these plants. Use a pot that has a diameter a third the size of the plant’s leaf diameter. Give African violets plenty of indirect sunlight but placing them in direct sun will result in sunburn. Give flowering plants a liquid feed with an African violet food, and groom them regularly to remove dead flowers and leaves. Turn standard African violets weekly to stop them growing lopsided and to keep their shape symmetrica­l. With singlecrow­ned varieties, remove suckers

(side shoots) with a clean, sharp knife blade (if they are large enough, you can pot these up to start new plants).

Sadly there are no longer any African violet societies active in New Zealand. I spoke to Jenny Burkett, former secretary of the Whanganui African Violet and Gesneriad Club, who told me that the club closed down due to the membership growing elderly and not enough new people joining. She is a past judge who once grew eight to nine hundred plants in a dedicated plant room with fluorescen­t lighting, but nowadays she has less than a hundred. When asked what she loves about African violets she says it is the flowers and their iridescent sparkle. “They just glisten and look beautiful.”

Jenny says not to grow cyclamens with your African violets, because they can carry mites that could infect your collection. Her favourite method of dealing with woolly aphid and mealy bug infestatio­n is to use cotton wool to dab a 50/50 solution of methylated spirits and water on every surface of the plant, even the roots. Healthy plants are more resistant to disease, so ensuring your plants are robust can help avoid issues, but it’s also good practise to isolate any new plants for six weeks (and any sick plants immediatel­y too). Not sure what’s wrong with your plant? There’s a useful symptoms-based

Smaller pots are better for these plants. Use a pot that has a diameter a third the size of the plant’s leaf diameter.

guide for diagnosing common African violet problems on the Optimara website (Optimara are the world’s largest African violet producer). Go to optimara.com and click on the Doctor Optimara link.

Knights Nurseries is New Zealand’s largest commercial supplier of African violets, and hold the licence for Optimara African violets here. According to owner Howard Knight, the heyday of African violets was in the 70s, 80s and 90s, when they were one of the top five indoor plants sold. But he says they fell out of fashion as part of a worldwide trend, as they had a reputation for being “an old person’s flower” when newer easycare houseplant­s became available.

However, the last two years have seen a steady increase in demand for African violets, with sales expanding into Bunnings in the South Island. And Howard confirms there is still a small group of hobbyists with a vast variety of plants, including the older cultivars (he knows this because when he receives shipments of new varieties there are collectors who are keen to view them!)

But instead of club meetings, today’s passionate African violet

Once pups have formed around the leaf, divide and pot them up separately. You should have plenty of plants to swap or give away.

enthusiast­s are congregati­ng online, and there are active groups on Facebook and Instagram as well as some personal blogs.

Judging by the increasing amount of online activity, African violets are growing in popularity with much younger growers.

Samantha Campbell, who set up the African Violet Lovers New Zealand Facebook group more than three years ago, agrees that the interest is there.

“I noted the absence of any dedicated network for African violet lovers in New Zealand and as a result I found it hard to find more African violets to add to the ones I had,” she explains. “I thought, I might as well see if there were others interested in

“Collectors of variegated houseplant­s have been drawn to African violets as they go in search of stunning variegated leaves.”

African violets out there. At the time there weren’t many New Zealand Facebook groups for indoor plants in general. It’s actually amazing to see how many have proliferat­ed in just the last year or two.”

The group facilitate­s members swapping plants by post or meeting up offline, and members can receive guidance on growing, maintainin­g and hybridisin­g violets, and share photos, stories and informatio­n (Search for African Violet Lovers New Zealand on Facebook or email AVLoversNZ@gmail.com).

“In the last year especially, collectors of variegated houseplant­s have been drawn to African violets as they go in search of stunning variegated leaves. And of course African violets have a wonderful array of flowers too,” Samantha says. “I also think people are looking for more colour in their lives and homes, so flowering houseplant­s are desirable.”

Samantha put me in touch with Maria Skatova, a collector who felt, since there aren’t enough African violets to collect in New Zealand, she would hybridise her own! Originally from Russia, she moved here a few years ago. She told me that there is a lot of hybridisin­g in Russia and the Ukraine, where there are entire shops dedicated just to African violets.

Maria was disappoint­ed when she realised our biosecurit­y restrictio­ns meant she would be unable to import new plants to add to her collection. “I think I was in denial for a while about their popularity here,” she says.

She particular­ly loves miniatures – she says since they are small she can fit more in her collection. Miniatures are no longer sold commercial­ly in New Zealand, so Maria struggled to find varieties and put enormous effort into sourcing them from other collectors. She now has around 600 seedlings from crosses, with her second batch of seedlings now in bloom. She selects for foliage colour and disease resistance as well as for flowers. Some rarer qualities, she says, are wasp-shaped flowers and near-black coloured blooms (her blog at africanvio­lets.nz follows her hybridisat­ion journey).

“African violets have an undeserved reputation as fragile plants,” says Maria. “They are actually quite hardy. Just don’t over-love them. Too much care will kill them, whether that is light, water, pot size or fertiliser. They like things in moderation.” ✤