Amateur Gardening – 29 June 2019

18 AMATEUR GARDENING 29 JUNE 2019

Alstroemeria

If you want showy blooms for borders or containers, why not choose the lily of the

Incas?Anne Swithinbank explains how you can cultivate your own Peruvian pleasures

R

OSES might make lovely

bedroom flowers to welcome

weekend guests but for those

staying a week, choose

alstroemeria. Their colourful, lily-like

blooms have an outstanding vase

life and they lack the rich, often

overpowering perfume of lilies that can

be off-putting indoors. The names

Peruvian lily and lily of the Incas give

clues to their South American, mainly

Chilean, origins and they belong in their

own plant family, Alstroemeriaceae.

These are hardy exotics, growing

from a mass of fleshy rhizome-like

tubers. Once, it was unusual to see

any but common A. aurea growing

in gardens. The golden flowers are

attractive, but only for a comparatively

short period and, once established,

clumps tend to wander and spread.

Recent breeding has brought a wider

range of cultivars with beautiful blooms

opening over longer periods. They are

well behaved, happy to stay where they

are put, and include dwarf-growing kinds

suitable for containers and low planting.

Ground control

Although I have seen alstroemerias

described as ‘easy’, I can only think

this was written by someone who had

tried them only on well-drained soil.

Whenever I ask a group of gardeners

whether they’ve succeeded with

Peruvian lilies, there is always a sharp

divide between those on clay, whose

plants tend to die off over winter, and

those on loam or sands that drain well

and have no trouble.

The answer is simple – on clay soils,

you need to raise the planting area above

the general lie of the land. Create a raised

bed or, as I saw in a garden recently, add

a better-drained soil on top of improved

clay to make contours. Plants sensitive to

winter waterlogging were set in gently

rounded hillocks and mulched to hold

water around roots during summer.

How to grow...

Perfect partners for borders: Callistephus chinensis
‘Star Scarlet’ and Alstroemeria ‘Indian Summer’
All photographs Alamy unless otherwise credited

Alstroemeria

Potting plants on into a larger

container of fresh compost

reveals the fl eshy nature of

their roots. I’m using a 50:

mix of John Innes No2 and

soilless compost with a little

added grit and leafmould

Vibrant Alstroemeria ‘Flaming Star’, reaching

28in (70cm) tall, will fl ower profusely for weeks

The Little Miss Series of alstroemerias

(featuring ‘Veronica’) are very

compact, so they are ideal for

containers and low planting

The accepted method of

deadheading is to pull away

flowered stems so they come

clean from the base. This works

well for well-established plants

but for weaker ones, removing

just the spent flowers allows

stems and leaves to carry

on functioning.