My next species I want to get is r. Acicularis. On some sites I see that they say that the winters in zone 9b are too warm for Acicularis and that it would prevent it from flowering seasonally. Is this true?
It flowers OK here in 8b, but clearly doesn’t love this climate, so who knows.
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If the space, funds, and availability allow for it you could try out a few different kinds of acicularis from different regions to see which one performs the best in your climate. The species spans across three different continents and three different ploidies.
I’d be really interested to see a comparison between the Chinese and European octoploids and the Canadian hexaploids and American tetraploids. It’s hard to imagine that there wouldn’t be a considerable variation in how they grew in a warmer climate, and especially in how their hybrid offsprings performed.
Obviously that’s a fairy impractical experiment, but at the very least you might try sourcing a form of acicularis that’s better suited to bloom in your climate, or a ploidy that better fits your hybridizing goals.
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