Naturalized montbretia (escaped from its original garden location)
They can be evergreen or deciduousperennials that grow from basal underground corms. The alternate leaves are cauline and ensiform (sword shaped). The blades are parallel-veined. The margin is entire. The corms form in vertical chains with the youngest at the top and oldest and largest buried most deeply in the soil. The roots of the lowermost corm in a chain are contractile roots and drag the corm deeper into the ground where conditions allow. The chains of corms are fragile and easily separated, a quality that has enabled some species to become invasive and difficult to control in the garden.
They have colourful inflorescences of 4 to 20 vivid red and orange subopposite flowers on a divaricately (horizontally) branched stem. The terminal inflorescence can have the form of a cyme or a raceme. These flower from early summer well into fall. The flowers are sessile on a flexuose arched spike. The fertile flowers are hermaphroditic. All stamens have an equal length. The style branches are apically forked. They are pollinated by insects, birds (sunbirds) or by the wind. The dehiscent capsules are shorter than they are wide.
The genus name is derived from the Greek words krokos, meaning "saffron", and osme, meaning "odor" – from the dried leaves emitting a strong smell like that of saffron (a spice derived from Crocus – another genus belonging to the Iridaceae) – when immersed in hot water.[6]
The alternative name montbretia is still widely used, especially for the garden hybrid C. × crocosmiiflora.[7] "Montbretia" commonly used in the British Isles for orange-flowered C. × crocosmiiflora cultivars that have naturalised, while "crocosmia" is reserved for less aggressive red-flowered cultivars. Montebretia is a heterotypic synonym of the genus Tritonia in which some species of Crocosmia were once included. It was named by Alire Raffeneau Delile for Ernest Coquebert de Montbret [fr], a fellow French botanist on Napoleon's Egyptian Campaign.[8]
Species
Species accepted by World Checklist of Selected Plant Families[1]
Crocosmia aurea (Pappe ex Hook.) Planch. (Falling Stars) – eastern + southern Africa from Cape Province to Sudan; naturalised in Azores
Crocosmia × crocosmiiflora (Lemoine) N.E.Br. - South Africa; naturalised in parts of Europe, Rwanda, Zaire, Assam, Norfolk Island in Australia, Fiji, the Caribbean, Argentina, Tristan da Cunha (C. aurea × C. pottsii)
Crocosmia fucata (Lindl.) M.P.de Vos – Kamiesberg Mountains in Cape Province of South Africa
^Manning, John; Goldblatt, Peter (2008). The Iris Family: Natural History & Classification. Portland, Oregon: Timber Press. pp. 144–47. ISBN978-0-88192-897-6.
^"How to Grow Crocosmias."BBC Gardeners' World Magazine. 20 April 2020. Accessed at GardenersWorld.com on 10 February 2023. "Crocosmias are also known as montbretia, although this tends to refer to the common species Crocosmia x crocosmiiflora."
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