LITTLE GEMS

Cyclamens can not only brighten up your garden in the darkest months, says Monty Don, some are specially bred to thrive indoors too

Many of us will have brightened this midwinter gloom with injections of colour from houseplants. Poinsettias, amaryllis, hyacinths, paperwhite daffodils and, last but not least, cyclamens. Almost all the cyclamens that one sees so predominantly in winter containers leading up to Christmas and as houseplants over the next month or so are so- called ‘florists’ cyclamens’, which are rather different to the ones that flower freely but rather more daintily in our gardens.

Florists’ cyclamens have been bred from Cyclamen persicum, which originates from Cyprus, a few Greek islands and north Africa. It is therefore not surprising that they are tender and thrive in hot sun with good drainage – conditions which are miles away from the woodland shade that our much more familiar outdoor varieties, the autumn-flowering C. hederifolium and the spring flowering C. coum, prefer. However, C. persicum is strong, has a sweet fragrance and has been hybridised for more than a hundred years to develop a really big flower that will continue to bloom in the poor light and unnaturally dry winter heat of many homes and offices.

If you want your indoor cyclamens to continue to flower as long as possible, though, they should be kept away from bright sunlight and radiators and, without being subject to temperatures below about 10 º C, kept as cool as possible. It is scarcely worth trying to keep these cyclamens after they have finished flowering because it is quite hard to replicate their ideal conditions for reflowering next winter.

But much of the pleasure of gardening, especially at this time of year, is in welcoming old friends as they reappear in your flower beds. Certainly you can do that with C. coum which will start to produce their flowers – which range from deep carmine through magenta to pale pink and white – around the end of this month and continue to do so into spring. The foliage is almost as attractive as the flowers and has a wide variety of marbled markings from very dark green to almost silver. They are not native, originating from Bulgaria and Iran, but are very hardy and seem impervious to frost or snow. C. coum like rich but loose woodland soil, so add leafmould if you can to a pot or the ground. They do not like to be too dry in winter or too wet in summer, so planting them around the fringes of deciduous trees and shrubs is often ideal. The best time to plant is when they are actively grow- ing so any time over the next few months is perfect. They should be mulched every year after the leaves have died back, ideally with leafmould, but bark chips make a good substitute.

C. coum will gradually spread by seed but they do not do so at all invasively and can be outcompeted by other plants, so until they are well established they should have the field more or less to themselves – and the more of them you have, the better they will look. The one plant that is guaranteed to swamp them is C. hederifolium, which will start to flower in September and carry on doing so all autumn, so the two species of cyclamen should never be planted in the same spot.

The flowers of C. hederifolium (and the name comes from the plants’ ivy-like foliage, although they also share the lovely marbling of C. coum) appear to rise up ‘naked’ from the soil and the leaves follow much later. Like C. coum they have a corm – a flattened underground disc that can become quite large and lift well above the surface of the soil. This is a result of ageing and they should always be be planted initially a few inches deep. They do best in light shade and loose soil, but differ from C. coum in that they tolerate very dry shade, thus brightening up even the darkest corner.

This is a caption Monty holding two florists’ cyclamens