The alstroemeria family
Alstroemeriaceae is a small South American family that supplies one of the hardest working cut flowers in the trade, and it does so because two of its wild groups come from opposite climates and somebody crossed them.
around four genera
roughly 250 species
South America, centered on Chile and Brazil
Everything in this guide that belongs to Alstroemeriaceae
The flower has six segments in two rings of three, but unlike most things built that way the two rings are doing different jobs. The outer three are broad, rounded and usually plain. The inner three are narrower, often a different color, and carry the dark streaks and flecks that give the flower its markings.
Those streaks are not decoration. They are nectar guides, converging lines pointing down the throat of the flower toward the reward, and they are on the inner segments because that is where an insect needs steering. The outer ring is the billboard; the inner ring is the signage.
The fruit finishes the job briskly. The capsule dries, builds tension in its walls and then splits and throws the seed several feet, which is a sensible arrangement for a plant that also spreads underground and would otherwise pile its seedlings on top of itself.
The wild species fall into two groups that could hardly be less alike. The Chilean ones come from a Mediterranean climate with wet winters and long dry summers, so they grow and flower in spring and then die back to fleshy storage roots and sit out the drought underground. The Brazilian ones come from summer rainfall forest and do the opposite, staying in growth through the warm wet months.
Neither is much use commercially on its own, because each has a season and then stops. From the 1970s onward breeders crossed the two groups deliberately, and what came out flowers far longer, tolerates a much wider temperature range and can be cropped from a greenhouse nearly all year. Almost every stem sold today comes from that work.
The plant grows from thickened storage roots rather than a bulb, and it runs sideways. Given a bed to itself it will colonize it, which is worth knowing before recommending one for a garden.
The best thing in this family is a plant almost nobody outside South America has seen. Bomarea is an alstroemeria that decided to climb: a twining vine running up through Andean scrub and cloud forest, and hanging off the end of each shoot is a drooping cluster of tubular flowers in scarlet, orange and green.
They are hummingbird flowers, built to the usual specification for that, which is a narrow tube, a lot of nectar, strong color and no scent at all, since birds hunt by eye. Hanging the cluster below the foliage puts it exactly where a hovering bird wants it and out of reach of anything that would have to land.
A handful of species are hardy enough for a mild garden and they are occasionally offered by specialists. For a family this small, having a climbing hummingbird flower and a workhorse florist crop under the same roof is a fair spread.
This family is one of the most common causes of occupational skin trouble in the flower trade, and it is worth knowing because the symptoms arrive slowly enough that people rarely connect them to the cause.
The compound involved is the same one that gives tulip handlers their problems, and it sits in the sap and on the stem surface. Repeated daily handling sensitizes people who were fine with it for years, and it then shows up as dry, cracked, itching fingertips and nail folds, usually on the hand that holds the stems rather than the hand that cuts. Once sensitized, a person stays sensitized.
It is entirely manageable and it is not a reason to stop stocking anything. Gloves for bulk stripping and washing hands after a long session deal with almost all of it. Anybody working a bench full time who has unexplained fingertip dermatitis should look at what they handle most, and in a lot of shops the answer is this.