Sinningia concinna

1. Jeanne Sorci's plant
2. David Harris's plant
3. Hybridization
4. Fred Stryker's plant
5. Origin
6. Feature table
7. External links
8. Publication and etymology

This is a difficult miniature, requiring terrarium conditions, but well worth the effort for those who can manage it.  The flowers are very elegant.

See a comparison table that relates S. concinna to the other two miniature species.

Jeanne Sorci's plant

The very nice plant in the picture was grown by Jeanne Sorci, of the Peninsula Gesneriad Society.  She grows it in an enclosed bubble (the top was removed for the photo).  The flower is small but striking.  As can be seen, Jeanne grows it in moss.

David Harris's plant

This is the prize-winning plant grown by the renowned small-sinningia hybridizer David Harris (of "Misery").  It is a tribute to his accomplishment that everybody was so impressed that he had a plant with six open flowers (there are two in back of the one on the right).  This species is not for the faint of heart or the easily discouraged!

Hybridization

Several hybrids have been made using S. concinna to get miniatures.  It was crossed with S. pusilla and S. hirsuta quite early, and with S. sellovii and S. sp. "Rio das Pedras" more recently.  See the micro page for details.

Fred Stryker's plant

Fred Stryker was a long-time member of the Peninsula Gesneriad Society who worked for many years as a chemist for IBM in San Jose (California) and before that served in the South Pacific during World War II.  He was particularly skilled in growing the micro sinningias.  When he died in February 2009, I inherited his micro collection.

This picture, taken in October 2009, shows the Sinningia concinna from his collection.  According to his label, it was planted in "Supersoil", the same straight-from-the-bag mix that I use for all my sinningias, so perhaps the plant is not as fussy about potting medium as its reputation would indicate.

The picture below shows a flower from this plant.

Fred was the source of Jeanne Sorci's plant as well.

Origin

Alain Chautems provided this information on the origin of Sinningia concinna:

The first decription of the species as Stenogaster concinna by J. D. Hooker in 1861 (Botanical Magazine, Tab. 5253) only mentions that the plant was observed in "Messrs. Veicht and Son's Nursery at Chelsea in the month of April last, but it is not known from what country it came, nor by whom it was imported....". Soon after that, it appeared in other Horticulture journals, like Flore des Serres by Van Houtte and Illustration Horticole by Lemaire and it was supposed that based on its morphological affinity with Sinningia hirsuta, its origin should be in Brazil. Hanstein in Flora Brasiliensis (1864) maintained this opinion. I have never found any material there and no local herbarium has anything like it in their collection, but who knows, such a tiny plant may have survived in some remote and hidden rocky outcrop in the mountains of Rio de Janeiro....

Thus, as far as we know, Sinningia concinna is extinct in the wild and exists only in cultivation.  One therefore wonders how many clones of this species there are -- perhaps not very many.

Feature table for Sinningia concinna

External Links

See a picture on Ron Myhr's Gesneriad Reference Web.

Mauro Peixoto's web site also has a page on S. concinna.

Publication

Sinningia concinna was first published (as a Stenogastra) in 1861 by Hooker.  Nichols transferred it to Sinningia in 1887.

Etymology: Latin concinna ("symmetrical, elegant").