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Gloxinias
Gloxinias are relatively easy to grow from seed, but the plants take seven months from seed to bloom to produce flowers. The really great news is that once you have a mature gloxinia plant, it can live for years. As a rule of thumb, if you can successfully grow african violets, you can probably grow gloxinias. They both are members of the Gesneriaceae family. The care of the two species is quite similar, other than the gloxinia's required periods of dormancy.
Above is a composite of the gloxinias in my classroom that shows some of the variety in bloom colors and single and double blooms.
It's best to use sterilized potting soil. I really don't trust the starting mixes sold in stores, as even if it leaves the factory sterile, a hole in the bag could admit damping off fungus, the bane of new plants. I just use a good potting mix with some peat moss and lime added and bake it in the oven at around 400o for an hour to sterilize it.
The seeds are tiny. I've not come across a really good way to distribute the small seed other than just carefully tapping the seed packet or glassine envelope they often come in as I move my hand across the pot. There's no need to try to firm the seed into the soil, as it might stick to ones fingers and be lost. Just bottom water the pots. Gloxinia seed does need light to germinate, so I set my the pots under my plant lights. The seed will germinate at room temperature or just a bit below in about a week to ten days. In the shot below, the germinating gloxinias share a flat with some fall lettuce.
The plants will appear as tiny specs of green against the potting soil when they germinate. I wait until they show their first true leaves before moving them into four packs.
Before getting into transplanting, I need to take a quick sidetrip here. Gloxinias form a bulblike structure at the base of the plant called a corm. "Corms are stems that are internally structured with solid tissues, which distinguishes them from bulbs, which are mostly made up of layered fleshy scales that are modified leaves." (credit: Wikipedia) As long as you don't try to split the corm, the distinction really isn't all that critical. But, you obviously don't want to break off or harm the corm.
To transplant, I use a small knife or plastic plant marker to tease the tiny plants and their fledgling corm and root system out of the soil. I do try to bring along the surrounding soil if possible. I make a small hole in the receiving cell of the four pack and drop the plant into it and gently firm the area around it. The transplanting process usually has to be repeated a number of times, as the gloxinias seem to germinate unevenly so they aren't all ready to transplant at once.
Then the freshly transplanted gloxinias go back into the flats under the plant lights. Let me emphasize here that you want to only bottom water your gloxinias. If you top water, you risk starting leaf rot, and at the very least, will have discolored areas on the leaves. Also, I got my lights too low and bleached out some of this planting! I was trying to get the lights about an inch above the top leaves but now have backed them off to three to four inches above the plants.
I'm sure I lost some plants, but I also know some will rebound now that my plant lights are a bit higher. In the photo above, the healthy looking green plant near the top left extended beyond the close plant light and remained healthy from another, higher plant light. After about 4-6 weeks in four packs, the some of the plants are ready to move to their final pot. Since the germination of the original plants is somewhat irregular at times, transplanting is also staggered a bit.
I generally use four inch square pots for gloxinias, although I also use six inch rounds for varieties I suspect may grow a bit larger. I'm still working my way through a couple of cases of pots I bought years ago when Mellengers was still in business, but some of the pots are becoming a bit brittle. (If you know of a good bulk supplier, let me know.) I'm still pretty picky about the potting soil I use. Although damping off fungus is no longer a worry, I still use my sterilized soil mix of commercial potting soil, peat moss, a dusting of lime, and sometimes a bit of Captan. The Captan is to hold back any moss that may have gotten transplanted with the plant to its final pot.
When I took the two shots of the gloxinia in its four inch pot, I was surprised to see through the camera's viewfinder an early bloom starting! I'd really planned to talk about pinching off blooms a bit later, but...
Once done, it's back under the plant lights for the various sized plants. I transplanted the last of the gloxinias out of the starter "pots" today and also moved most of the ones in four packs into 4" pots. I knew I had to get this work done, as I have around 50 geranium seeds germinating over the heating pad that will need to go into four packs next week. (See: Growing Geraniums from Seed.)
Despite my efforts to discourage it by pinching off blooms, one of the gloxinias is now blooming. I got busy and didn't check the plants as regularly as I should have this month, only checking their moisture level. The blooms will be a pretty addition when I move the plant upstairs, but obviously, the plant's energy is now split between growing foliage and blooming, where I'd rather it just be growing right now.
I'll probably try to start another round of gloxinias sometime this spring for late fall potted plants. That's a very busy time in the garden and under my plant lights. But it's also just the right time to start gloxinias for September and October blooms. So, I'm going to make an effort to find the time and space for them under the plant lights. Note that I rarely put gloxinias outside in the summer. They just don't seem to do as well as they do under the plant light. But when space gets tight... You might wonder why I'd consider starting more plants in the spring when I currently have ten healthy gloxinias. Over the years I've found that friends and visitors to our home (and in the past, to my classroom) generally oohed and aahed over the plants. When given one, they were absolutely delighted. I expect our gloxinia population to begin to dwindle as the plants come into bloom, and they are adopted out to good homes. As the rest of the plants come into bloom, I'll begin hand pollinating the blooms, tagging the pollinated blooms (usually with just a loosely attached twist tie), and collecting seed once they dry out. Our one blooming gloxinia finished its early bloom cycle and went back downstairs under the plant lights this week. Hopefully, it will now add foliage and build its corm before blooming again. When I was uploading some video to YouTube to illustrate the Brinno GardenWatchCam I really wasn't thrilled with the gloxinia offerings on eBay, but I succumbed to the temptation last week and ordered several packets of gloxinia seed. The seed was packaged in small plastic bags, which made it very difficult to seed. The dustlike seed clung to the the sides of the bags, so I had to cut them open and wash the seed off the plastic into the planting pot.
So, even though I already have nine or ten healthy gloxinia plants under my grow lights, there are 30 seeds in the pot shown above.
It appears the gloxinias are putting up one or two early blooms before returning to growing leaves and adding to their corm. As they finish this early blooming cycle, I return them to the plant rack in the basement under our plant lights. I noticed the leaves on the gloxinias in the basement were yellowing a bit. I began top watering with some dilute fertilizer that contains extra iron, but also switched one bulb per fixture to a new 6500K (daylight) fluorescent tube. The remaining old fluorescent tubes are 4100K, which probably was the problem. I've noticed immediate improvement.
At this point, you might wonder why I go to all the trouble of growing gloxinias. It does take a long time from seed. Below is a photo taken in my classroom in 1996 of a Double Brocade gloxinia. I think the picture easily answers the possible question above.
April 14, 2009
I've moved each of the gloxinias into four inch plastic pots when they're ready, although many have required a move to a six inch square pot later. The frequent moves have also helped me get away from a dreadful potting mix I used early on.
Here are the four inch square pot bunch. As you can see, I'm having some yellowing that repotting and/or fertilizing, plus watching moisture levels seems to correct.
Some of the gloxinias above have been moved to six inch round pots. The Empress variety almost always produces a larger plant and requires the larger pot. Notice the two gloxinias in the white, four inch square pots will need a larger pot soon. A couple of the plants that have already bloomed once are putting on multiple buds and should be free flowering soon. If you're keeping score, it appears that the first bunch will be in full bloom about eight and a half months after seeding. It's been eight to nine months from seed, but we finally have our first gloxinia in full bloom. We've been tantalized over the last few months with plants with one, two, or three blooms, before they stop blooming and begin building foliage and corm again. The gloxinia pictured below has six open blooms with at least seven or eight more showing. I'm sorta proud of it, as it's one of our gloxinias from saved seed, rather than from seed I purchased.
It's probably time for me to get some more gloxinia seed started for full blooms next December or January. Of course, I'll still have my current plants (if I don't give them all away as I'm prone to do at times), but I'd like to get back to glorious displays such as the one pictured at the top of this feature.
Still to Come: Pinching, Dormancy, Leaf Cuttings, and Saving Seed I've been taking things pretty much in chronological order in this feature. Some readers may be way ahead of me and have questions about pinching off plants, how to treat gloxinias as they enter and emerge from dormancy, how to replicate plants via leaf cuttings, and/or how to pollinate and save seed from them. I'll get to each of these issues as we get there. And, I've purposely avoided talking about pinching off plants to make them bush out better, as I'm really not very good at it. If you have questions before I get to this stuff, write. September 11, 2009 - Saving Seed from Gloxinias
I wasn't happy with the sharpness of some of the images of the seed in the flower ovaries (at left), so I'm waiting on some close-up filters I ordered before redoing the photography for the update.
I finally got some better images of pollinating gloxinias. The task took a digital SLR with manual focusing capabilities, a better lens than the "kit lens" supplied with the camera, a set of macro close-up filters (instead of a far more expensive macro lens), and a good tripod. But at long last, I've put up the seed saving information on a separate page, Saving Gloxinia Seed. Most of my gloxinia plants are headed towards dormancy, so that will probably be the next topic I'll cover here. If I can, I'll also snip a few leaf cuttings for propagation and document that process here as well. March 18, 2010 - Creative Pinching
Years ago, you used to be able to send gloxinia plants from local florists. The plants delivered often had masses of six to ten blooms in the center. It made for a fantastic gift. One of our last gloxinias to come into bloom this blooming period had a number of buds trapped under its leaves. There really was no way to gently guide the buds past some new leaves in the center of the plant, so I just pinched off the leaves, leaving an outer ring of older leaves with the buds and blooms in the center unimpeded in their upward growth. I think the florist gloxinias of old were probably second year plants, but I'm hoping to achieve the same effect with my first year plants with the creative pinching. As I saw the cluster of blooms maturing on the plant I pinched off a few weeks ago, I cut off the existing blooms to allow the plant to put all its energy into a big splash of blooms. My wife was a bit disappointed, as the cut blooms really hadn't begun to wilt all that much. But the result was just what I wanted. In just a few days, the plant put up six new blooms with more on the way.
While this isn't our prettiest gloxinia, it sure is a nice addition to our kitchen window. And, this was from a first year corm. Gloxinias that are in their second or later years can produce really dazzling clusters of blooms, as their corms are much stronger. Saturday, December 24, 2011 - Surprises
I didn't spill any seed on the pots, nor do I reuse potting soil without first composting it and then sterilizing it in the oven. So the seeds didn't come from either of those two possible sources.
The cutting back of ragged and dead foliage made possible my "discoveries." Apparently, the plants had somehow self-pollinated (not too many bees in our basement), and I simply didn't notice. I'd been too busy with other stuff to do much more with the plants than their weekly watering. When I finally did get the plants cleaned up, there were lots of spent bloom to pick off. I never noticed any seed bearing stems, but I was going pretty fast when I cut and pinched off the old growth and blooms. I pinched off a few more leaves today that may be shading the baby gloxinias. It shouldn't hurt the existing, mature gloxinias, as they are pretty well on their way towards their required period of dormancy. When the tiny gloxinias get just a bit larger, I'll transplant them into fourpacks or 3" square pots. Dormancy (Updated 4/8/2011)
Sadly, some plants never emerge from dormancy. If it's your one prized gloxinia, that's pretty bad. We now have dozens of gloxinia plants in various stages of growth, so losing one or two isn't a tragedy. The late James Underwood Crockett wrote in Crockett's Indoor Garden Of course, he proceeds to tell the following somewhat humorous story:
Where to Buy Gloxinia Seed (and Plants) (updated 4/23/2011) The Empress gloxinia seed for this project came from Stokes Seeds in Buffalo, New York. A packet of 25 seeds runs just $3.25. Stokes ships to both the U.S. and Canada. If you're just getting started growing gloxinias and/or indoor plants, it's the one to start with. The Double Brocade hybrid is available from Thompson & Morgan Seeds. My initial Double Brocade seed came from Park Seed, but they dropped the variety several years ago. Thompson & Morgan sold its U.S. division a year or so ago, but the new outfit still carries the seed (tmseeds.com), although it only ships to U.S. postal addresses. Folks in the UK can still get several gloxinia varieties from the original Thompson & Morgan (thompson-morgan.com). There generally are listings on both eBay and Amazon
The Violet Barn also has outstanding ratings on the Garden Watchdog on Dave's Garden.
It takes seven months, more or less, for gloxinias grown from seed to flower, but the payoff is well worth the effort. This feature on Senior Gardening isn't complete by any means. But after years of growing and enjoying gloxinias and years of writing on the web, I realized that I'd never done a whole piece on these gorgeous and easy to grow plants. Rather than wait until the project was done, I decided to put up what I had and come back later to finish. |
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I start our gloxinias in shallow pots that used to come as reinforcement on the bottom of one and two liter soft drink bottles. Most any wide, shallow pot should really do for starting the seed.
, I ran across a video labeled "Flower Bloom." I think the video is from the camera's manufacturer, but how delightful (for me, at least) that the flower blooming was a gloxinia!
We're now getting some good amounts of seed from our gloxinias. I did a posting on my 
(out of print now, but still available used from Amazon) that "there is absolutely nothing complicated about handling a gloxinia during its dormancy." He adds that "gloxinias can live for years - fifty-year-old plants are not unknown." 
for gloxinia seed, but you might also want to check out the sellers' ratings at 
and some pots of sterilized growing medium to start cuttings from the damaged plant.
last updated 12/24/2011
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