Azalea Winter flowers

How strange. I bought my mom a few azalea flowers for her birthday in early summer. After the flowers had fallen and the seeds removed both were then repotted. It is now the first week of Winter and to my amazement i noticed an abundance of flower buds and one flower.

Hi Mike,
I got some to, lovely to have some flowers now.
On page 15, 11 febr, 2011
of the bonsai Questions page you find a thread on this
'Is this a satsuki or other azalea'
from Boughclipper
Sunip

Thanks for your reply Sunip. I am not sure what azalea it is as i got it from a garden centre. Thank you for the heads up on the thread.

Hi Mikey.

Was it with the landscape plants or inside with the houseplants? Post a picutre of the whole plant and the flower when you can.

R

Plants grown for sale as flowering pot plants are frequently grown under controlled conditions to ensure delivery of bloom at the right time, this throws the natural cycle of the plant off, sort of like the jet lag I am suffering.

I have a 'Nancy of Robinhill' azalea that flowered twice this year. First in spring and then again in autumn. It still has some flowers opening despite some frost.
Nancy is a cultivar with belgian indica florist blood. So maybe that is why it flowers rather easily. We had a very cold summer after a hot spring and followed by a warm autumn.

In Japan they call this 'toboke zaki' or fool's blooms. I don't know how often it happens but apparently satsuki can do it as well. But maybe again here it is mostly the satsuki with belgian indica blood, I don't know.

The leafs don't really look like the typical pureblooded Belgian indica. But they have some variation. Those you get from a garden center indoor are Belgian indica just ready to pop. Usually people keep them indoors and throw them away when the flowers fall.
They are given a cold period to trigger the blooms. They will all be ready to bloom the moment they are put for sale. It's a very reliable technique and the cultivar have been hybridized for the purpose.

Hi,
Here such a garden center azalea in the green house flowering a second time.
Sunip

Probably because we've had the warmest autumn on record up here, all four of my bonsai azaleas threw out the occasional flower in late October-early November to the extent that I held back on putting them into their winter shelter for a few weeks in case it promoted too much flower. They seemed content with two or three flowers each but the amount of bud on them right now is amazing.

I think its the japanes garden azalea close relativ of the satsuki sold under the name diamant azalea, very normal for them to flower on and off with the main flowering period early summer.

Peter

Hi all!

I have 4 different azalea and all of them always start to bloom in this time of the year. When the Spring comes they almost don't have any remaining flower. I bought my first one about 3 or 4 years ago and it remained all this time outdoors, with no protection from the weather. Also, where I live, Portugal, is very usually to see azaleas blooming in this time of the year.

It's been a while since I want to ask somebody if this is normal. In the internet I always find information saying that the normal blooming time for azaleas is between march and june... but this is not what I always see around here... What do you think?

In Hawaii and I think also southern California satsuki azalea bloom one flower at a time all year long. There is not enough cold to synchronize all the blooms.

There must be several different ways in which an azalea tries to determine when to flower. Lenght of days, temperature, etc. They need to decide when to start growing buds rather than new leaves.

If this is undesirable, you have to try many different types of azalea and see how they flower. I don't know of any azalea hybridizers in Portugal or Spain. They were all developed for winters in Japan, the US, Germany-Belgium-Netherlands, etc.

Glaucus wrote:In Hawaii and I think also southern California satsuki azalea bloom one flower at a time all year long. There is not enough cold to synchronize all the blooms.

The same thing happens here, but not with all of them. With some it's more seasonal - spring and fall. The Japanese satsuki 'momo-no-haru' and the American satsuki 'astronaut' bloom almost continuously even through our winter freezes. I went out to take some pictures at a friend's nursery, but we've had a couple of frosts so the flowers in the fields were damaged. Here are some shots from the unheated liner houses...

'red slipper' (Harris)



'wachet' (Robin Hill)



'conversation piece' (Robin Hill)



'koromo-shikibu' (southern indica)



'midnight flare' (Harris)

I want to see 'Midnight Flare' with my own eyes once. I hear it is one of the best true reds.

Yes, Xuan, that's Koromo Shikibu. Keep us posted, you don't often see it grown as bonsai. The leaves are kinda big, and very fuzzy. The autumn color is pretty though.