I thought I'd share with you one of our family's favourite Streptocarpus varieties. It's one of the best, Streptocarpus 'Falling Stars'.
Gareth stumbled upon Streptocarpus 'Falling Stars' back in 1985. It was on a bench in the nursery and was a natural mutation from S. johannis. The new plant had slightly larger flowers and was a darker blue. It also had many, many more flowers. This extraordinary variety didn't just flourish in our nursery; it captivated hearts everywhere, earning the Royal Horticultural Society's prestigious Award of Garden Merit (AGM) in 1993.
Some of it's wonderful features:
■ Masses of sky blue flowers - many hundreds all at once.
■ A quick growing variety.
■ One of the best for beginners to try propagating.
■ A lovely well balanced plant, size of leaf to volume of flowers.
■ One of the best for competing in your local flower show.
Streptocarpus tend to produce mutations fairly frequently (approx. one in every 5000) – most are not worth growing and end up being discarded. Another chance mutation was when a plant of 'Falling Stars' lost some of the blue pigment in its flowers and produced a lavender pink bloom. This was indeed worth keeping and we multiplied this sport up and introduced it as 'Gloria' in 1991. These two plants were ideal candidates to breed from as they have a long flowering season, over 13 blooms per inflorescence (flower stalk) and have a nice rosette of leaves. Over the decades, we have introduced a series of new varieties that have lots of the good qualities of 'Falling Stars' but in a wider range of colours and smaller habit.
