Growing Clivia in Cold Climates

Storing Pollen

This is aimed at Clivia lovers in colder climates. While these plants can be grown outdoors in the ground as landscape perennials in parts of Florida and California, residents of most of the rest of the USA have to treat them as container plants.

When you decide to start hybridizing your own clivias, you come up against the problem of having the right pollen available to use when that special plant blooms. It turns out that the solution is very straight forward: store pollen of desirable plants when they are in bloom.

Clivia pollen is very hardy. It can be stored in closed containers in a freezer and remain viable for up to 5 years, according to Pen Henry, of the Clivia Gardens in Wanneroo, Western Australia.

The following are some general principles of pollen storage and they apply as well to other plants such as daylilies (Hemerocallis), amaryllis (Hippeastrum), Nerine, Crinum, and even Haemanthus.

Place the anther with the pollen in a small container
- Gel capsules, obtainable at some pharmacies
- Empty 35-mm film canisters
- 3-dram glass vials with screw caps
- 1.5-mL plastic microcentrifuge tubes
Dry the pollen
- At room temperature
- In a refrigerator
- The drier the pollen is, the longer it will remain viable in storage
- Drying may require from a few hours to a day or more, depending on your ambient relative humidity
Seal the container
- To keep foreign pollen from getting mixed with the sample
- To keep out moisture
Store in a freezer
- The colder the storage temperature, the longer the pollen will stay viable