Description
Price per 1x tuber of Sauromatum brevipes. Tubers are small – please see the photo for size reference.
This is my first release of Sauromatum brevipes, and just two tubers are available. This is perhaps one of the rarest species I grow and one of my most treasured plants. It is both very rare in nature and in cultivation with just a handful of people in Europe growing this. It is not a plant for the casual grower, being a tiny dwarf thing and potentially fussy in requirements. As an indication of its rarity, a google image search brings up no photos other than those found in scientific research papers…
Sauromatum brevipes is found in dense and undisturbed rhododendron forest remote parts of the Sikkim Himalaya, often found growing as an epiphyte. It makes a dwarf plant to around 20cm in height when mature. This form has ghostly cream coloured spathes flushed with pink inside the spathe tube and a pale yellow spadix. Quite unlike anything else. My plants are yet to flower, so I cannot yet show a photo.
Growing from a small circular tuber which ultimately reaches around 2cm in diameter, Sauromatum brevipes is best grown in a well drained compost mix in a pot. We use a mixture of good quality peat free multipurpose compost, vermiculite and perlite. We have cultivated our plants in a greenhouse with shade netting and they seem to do ok under these conditions.
As is common with other species within the genus, Sauromatum brevipes makes offsets around the perimeter of the tuber. However, rather strangely, these are always minute – no more than 1mm in size and smaller than many seeds! They are clearly very easily missed in the compost. Our stock was originally grown on from a small number of these tiny offsets.
