Scintillating Silver Sparkles

[David Clulow]

There has fairly recently been some correspondence on 'Black Beauty'.  As far as I know the only nursery to have this is Mr Ko and he has not yet released it.  However, he does sell a small amount of very high quality seeds with this name; but you may have to purchase a collection of 10 packets of different named varieties to get 10 seeds.  This I did, as usual, 15 seeds arrived and I raised 10 of these to flowering size.  All were excellent and #2 and #10 were well worth using for breeding.  These seedlings had a certain crystalline flower texture, very difficult to capture with the camera, giving a sparkling form to the flower.  When I grew magnolias in England, I used to visit my friend Sir Peter Smithers in Switzerland to see his fantastic collection.  He was also a brilliant photographer and used also to be the world expert Nerine breedeer.  He would show me his huge photos of magnolias, peonies and nerines (3-4 feet wide Lazerprints) and would explain to me his techniques for attempting to capture the crystalline texture of his nerines which he complained he could never quite get right to show off their true beauty.   

I feel that we may just be starting to get this crystalline quality now in Adeniums.  These two 'Black Beauty' seedlings show a varying degree of this sparkling crystalline texture; looking as though they had been sprinkled with silver dust: