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Blooming ginger

Hey folks, I bought a couple small dried up very lightweight bulbs of this somewhat rare ginger called Kampferia elegans. It's a short low growing Ginger that looks very similar to a maranta/calathea or "prayer plant". I really had given these bulbs up for dead a few weeks ago when all of a sudden several long cigar shaped leaves shot up from the soil and unrolled. Now they're getting quite large and I noticed the other day that they bloomed (the flower stalk looks like an aroids spathe but instead of a spadix out comes with purple flower! But as luck would have it I missed the flowers!
I happened to peek in there today and they re-bloomed so I shot these pics before the very thin and fragile flowers collapse again. Hope you dig em!

kampferiaelegans.jpg

kampferiaelegans2.jpg


It's growing in my hot/humid lowland nepenthes chamber under 400W of metal halide. I'll repot when the blooming stops.
 
Very nice! Congratulations on getting something out of those bulbs. The foliage really does look pretty nice. Are you going to try to hand pollinate them or if you're looking for more will you just wait for rhizome cuttings?
 
Nice! I just recently noticed growths on some ginger at the grocery store so I bought some and stuck it in a pot. Something is growing up on it...maybe its a curled up leaf... That would be cool...

Beautiful flower there.
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I've got a big 3 ft Hedichium sp. ginger growing with my daturas that I'm hoping will bloom soon, it's called the Luna Moth Ginger for good reason, the blooms look very similar to a 6" glowing greenish white moth. I'm so anxious to see that one!

I've often thought about growing some of the Zingiber officinale (common edible ginger) I've seen some huge rhizomes, the only reason they are not generally growing at the store is it's too cold in the produce section for the rhizome to break dormancy. But with the heat wave the US is experiencing I'd bet it's not uncommon to see the starts coming on the rhizome.

My book on gingers doesn't talk about how to get seed from this one, merely IDs it. The previous bloom is just a dried dead sac so there must be a need of crossing with another plant of a different genetic material to get effective pollination.
 
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