Description
(Schnarfia but please read below)
Channelled, glaucous green, 1cm wide leaves about 7cm long are held in a loose rosette below a 15cm tall stem with a 5-8cm spike of bright blue flowers, each held on short stalks. The spike is nicely crammed with flowers. Flowering begins in March lasting until April. Each bulb can make several spikes, depending on size. When young, the blue stars are infused with a very pale pink-purple. The spike, though dwarf (on a dwarf plant) is very attractive.
Likes very light shade or preferably a sunny, well-drained soil but not too much drying out in the summer, making it ideal in the garden where it combines a delicate appearance with a tough constitution. It will also grow happily in an alpine house pot or pan.
(for those interested who see the name of a dwarf blue bulb – Schnarfia messeniaca it does seem that in horticulture at least the plants grown under that name are NOT the same as existing stocks of Scilla messeniaca. There appear to be two different plants involved. Scilla messeniaca, under whatever name it acquires in the new classification, is not and never has been the same as what was originally spread about by horticulturalists as Schnarfia messeniaca. I have a direct confirmation of this precise detail from Franz Speta, the botanist who described Schnarfia. They are distinct in horticulture and they are two different species involved. What is doing the rounds as Schnarfia has characteristic, wide, flat, green leaves (not glaucous and channelled as in Scilla messeniaca). In cultivation the Schnarfia of horticulture flowers ahead of the Scilla. Both stocks are seemingly from Messenia, in Greek Peloponnesus.
Scilla messeniaca