Cyclamen: A Winter Companion
Winter is the time when you see colourful flowering cyclamen for sale. The rich colours of their flowers combine with the deep green of their leaves to decorate and enliven your home. People complain quite often that their cyclamen die after a short time. Treated correctly, though, cyclamen will stay with you and continue flowering into March.
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Cyclamen are a colourful way of keeping grey winter feelings out of your home. They come in many shades of white, pink, purple, and red; some species even combine two colours. All cyclamen you might buy at this time of the year are hybrids derived from the Cyclamen persicum. They don’t like frost or heat. The ideal temperature to keep them in is somewhere between 12 and 16 °C but definitely below 20 °C. At the same time, they like humid air and lots of light but no direct sun. The combination of these requirements makes it often tricky to find the ideal place for them in an apartment.
If you have a cool place near a window, that would be the ticket. Cyclamen don’t mind if you keep them in plastic, terracotta, or ceramic pots as long as these pots have one or several holes in the bottom. They prefer not to be watered from above and absolutely hate it when you spray them with water. Water them by dunking them in stale water at room temperature for 15 minutes; this can be done in a pot, bowl, or the sink. Make sure the water level is below the plant pot rim, though. And let them drain well before putting them back in their place.
As they like humid surroundings, you should make sure they get some humidity from somewhere. You can provide that by placing the cyclamen pot inside a larger and deeper pot partially filled with stones. Keep the stones wet to allow water to evaporate; make sure the water doesn’t reach the flower pot as cyclamen tubers rot when kept in standing water. If you have several plants, standing the pots on stones or gravel will work on a tray just as well. Never spray water on cyclamen to achieve air humidity; it’s a sure way of losing the flowers.
Plant food should be used very sparingly. The plants grow in mountainous areas in Mediterranean climate. They can be found in crags and fissures. They are used to being kept short in nutrients. If you give them too much food, they go leaf happy; they stop making flowers and produce so many leaves they start to look like cabbages.
Cyclamen hybrids come in three distinctive sizes; small (often called mini), medium, and large. The size of your plant is a given thing. If you buy a small one, don’t expect it to grow up to become a large one. It won’t do that for you, even if you have a talk with it every day. The advantage is, there are no nasty surprises of suddenly having a giant taking up all space your apartment.
