More about Queensland Rock Violets

Finding Them

Though I first read about Queensland Rock Violets some time ago, I didn't actively search for them until about 4 years ago. Disappointingly, the story was the same over and over again... either the nursery had never heard of this plant or used to carry them but don't any longer :( But, I didn't stop at the nurseries and also posted messages on garden forums and contacted the local botanic gardens. Thankfully, one of these messages made it to a kind gardener at the Mount Annan Botanic Gardens who offered to give me two old specimens they had in one of their green houses.

In my opinion, it's a shame that this plant is not better known and more commonly grown. And, since it is so hard to find, I'm more than willing to give what plant material I can to anyone interested in giving this plant a go.

Feeding Them

The first lesson I was taught by this plant occured when I feed all of my specimens with a standard liquid plant fertiliser. While all the other plants I fed with that solution were fine, within 30 minutes all of the Rock Violets were horribly wilted!? I desperately tried to reverse what I had done by flushing out all of the Rock Violet pots over and over again with fresh water. I managed to save all the plants but many of them were seriously damaged. Despite Rock Violets being Australian natives, I thought it would be ok to feed them with standard fertiliser because I never heard of phosphorus intolerance in gesneriads... and still today I've only read of phosphorus intolerance in more classic Australian genera like Grevillea and Boronia. But, that's an experiment I ain't going to repeat and have since fed the Rock Violets with slow release native Australian (low phosphorus) plant food... to which they respond well.

The Right Soil

The plants I got from the Mount Annan Botanic Gardens were vibrant and healthy but, as time passed, it was obvious that they were not thriving with me :( The first way I tried to address this was to replace the relatively heavy and sandy soil that they were growing in at the Mount Annan Botanic Gardens with a standard African Violet soil mix. Still no luck and I was just about to give up hope of ever keeping these plants happy when, half out of desperation, I tried a new soil mixture of my own invention... quarter peat moss, quarter sphagnum moss, quarter African Violet soil mix and quater sand. As rediculously rich and light as this mixture sounds, it did the trick! Within months the plants started thriving and I've been using that soil mixture ever since, though I often replace the sphagnum moss with vermiculite these days.

Growth and Flowering

The gardener from the Mount Annan Botanic Gardens warned me that the Queensland Rock Violet doesn't like it when temperatures drop below 14 degrees... to which I quipped "that's fine... I don't like it when the temperature drops that low either" :) But, Sydney winter lows are significantly lower than that (8 degree, plus or minus) and, even though I don't make any effort to protect my Rock Violets from those temperatures, they seem to do fine. Though the plant's growth comes to a crawl when cold temperature arrives, the low temperatures don't do any harm to the plants and, when warm weather returns, the plant's growth picks up again.

Here in Sydney, the Rock Violets don't start flowering until Summer (around Christmas time) but continue flowering until cold temperatures bring the plant's growth to a halt.

Propagation

Everything I've read about Queensland Rock Violets indicates that propagating them from leaf cuttings is quite easy... as easy as leaf cutting propagation of African Violets. But, this has not been my experience. The Rock Violet leaf cuttings wilt shortly after potting them up and it takes many days for them to recover and most only partially recover. Then it takes a long time for any new growth to appear and that only happens about 20% of the time... the other leaves eventually dying without any new growth. My current thinking is that the Rock Violet leaves are too big for direct potting up in soil and next time I'm going to try rooting the leaves in water before putting them into soil.

My Rock Violets regularly produce fruit and these fruits appear to ripen successfully but either gesneriad seeds are very small or something is going wrong. I haven't tried to sprout any of these small specs but I should... just to see what happens :)

The Other Australian Boea

I don't know how many members of the Boea genus are native to Australia but I have heard of at least one other Boea from Queensland... Boea Kinneari. It grows in the Windsor Tableland (just west of the Daintree Rain Forest) and seems to have many similarities to Boea Hygroscopica (the Queensland Rock Violet). It would be interesting to see how closely related these two plants are and whether crossing them would introduce greater variability and/or hybrid vigour to the offspring.