Crocosmia
Crocosmia × crocosmiiflora
Wants dividing every few years; beyond that, sun and a drink in a dry spell cover it.
- Type
- Flower · Perennial
- Botanical family
- Mixed / other
- Foliage color
- Green
- Flower color
- Orange
- Sunlight
- Full sun gives the best flowers.
- Watering
- Water through dry spells while it is growing and flowering.
- Feeding
- A compost mulch in spring is usually all it wants.
- Frost tolerant
- Yes
- Flowering
- July
- Pruning
- Let the foliage die back on its own; divide the clump every three or four years.
- Apr–Jul Spring Growth
- Jul–Sep Flowering
- Sep–Nov Growing
- Nov–Dec Leaf Fall
- Jan–Apr Leaf Fall
- Plant spacing
- 11.8 in
- In-row spacing
- 11.8 in
- Between rows
- 15 in
- Square-foot density
- Not suited to SFG
- Root system
- A corm with fine roots beneath it
- Working depth
- 4–10 in
- Can reach
- 16 in down where the soil allows
- Spread
- 6–12 in across, about 0.5–1× the width of the plant
- Shallowest pot
- 8 in of soil
A corm is a season’s worth of stored stem: it is spent flowering and a new one forms on top of the old, often with cormlets around it. Roots are shallow and short-lived, so the planting depth and the drainage are what decide whether it comes back.
Corms form in vertical chains, the new one on top of the last, so a clump gets deeper as well as wider and a missed corm at the bottom starts again. The vigorous old montbretia is a listed weed in several countries for exactly that reason.
The habit is Crocosmia’s own; the figures are what that habit usually comes to at this size, not a measurement of this species. Roots follow the soil either way: a compacted pan, a high water table or heavy clay stops them well short of any of it, and deep open ground lets them go further.
- Generally trouble-free No notable pest or disease problems when grown in the right conditions — one of the easy ones.
Grasses, Rudbeckia, Echinacea, Verbena
Green-leaved flowers, like this one.
The Cottage Garden Companion — the gardener's herbarium at cottagegardencompanion.com