Florists' year-round Peruvian lilies come from crossing Chile with Brazil
Wild alstroemerias keep to seasons: Patagonian species grow in winter, Brazilian ones in summer. Breeders crossed the two groups, starting with American trials in the 1980s, and produced plants that stay nearly evergreen and bloom for most of the year. The resulting cut flowers can last two weeks in a vase without wilting.
Alstroemeria, known as the Peruvian lily or lily of the Incas, is native only to South America, ranging from Venezuela just north of the Equator down to Tierra del Fuego. Nearly all species cluster in two hotspots. Chile has more than 50 recognised taxa, about 80 percent of them found only in the Mediterranean-style scrubland of the country's centre. Brazil holds more than 40 species, mostly outside the Amazon toward the south and east, in habitats from savannah and swamp to rocky highland grassland as high as 2,300 metres in Itatiaia National Park. Almost all are long-lived perennials; the exception is a tiny annual from Chile's Atacama Desert.
The plants grow from clusters of tubers and send up both flowering and sterile stems, some reaching 1.5 metres. A quirky detail: the leaves twist on their stalks so their undersides face upward. Each flower has six petals up to 5 centimetres long, in red, orange, yellow, pink, purple, green or white, typically flecked and streaked with darker markings.
The genus was described in 1762 in a dissertation by Johan Peter Falk under his supervisor Carl Linnaeus, who holds the botanical authority. It honours Linnaeus's friend, the Swedish baron Clas Alstromer, whose surname itself means alder stream.
Today at least 190 cultivars exist, and most commercial breeding happens in the Netherlands. Garden varieties usually flower in late spring and early summer, need at least six hours of morning sun and well-drained soil, and have roots hardy to about minus 5 degrees Celsius. Several have won the Royal Horticultural Society's Award of Garden Merit. Some have escaped gardens: A. aurea, native to Chile and Argentina, has naturalised in Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom and is considered a weed in Australia.
Source: Alstroemeria
